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Comment by izoow | Hacker News Reader

KDE is the desktop environment that finally made me stay on Linux full-time and I seriously feel like its developers don't get enough praise. Especially over the last years I feel like they've ironed out a ton of bugs and weird quirks and made KDE truly a joy to use.

I'm surprised to see how much Kate can do, and even more so that the author deemed it good enough to use in place of neovim. Maybe I should give it a chance someday.

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Kate has the best VI command emulator out there bar none and got a lot more usable for a lot of stuff when it added LSP support.

Kate is the core editor of KDevelop IDE too.

https://www.kdevelop.org/

I second that. I almost switched from vim to Kate. I do use the undecorated/non-IDE Kate version called "KWrite" which is the only no nonsense totally usable basic GUI editor with a vim mode. I can quickly write my notes and edit them the vim way and have a regular copy paste experience in the same time. Love it.

Really? Bar none? Better than evil?

Hard to imagine that's possible, since evil is already better than vim.

What makes Evil better than Vim in your experience?

Better configuration language. For instance

    (define-key evil-normal-state-map " " "@q")

    noremap <Space> @q

I know it's subjective and some people will say the later is better because it's shorter, but I greatly prefer the first. It's very descriptive, I can tell exactly what it does just by reading it. The vim version... "no remap"? I know it means "Normal Recursive Map", but that's not the way it reads unless you already know what it does. Vim just has a bewildering array of such things, noremap, nnoremap, vnnoremap, znormap, xnoremap, snoremap, onoremap, tnoremap... one of those is fake and you probably can't tell which.

Basically, vim has an old-school unix culture of naming things, while emacs has a lisp culture of naming things. Considering both these editors now come with powerful completion features that make it easy to type long symbol names, I think the lisp approach is the correct one.

I tried to like vimscript. Tried for nearly 15 years. When I finally took the plunge and switched to evil mode it was like a breath of fresh air, and I was left wondering why I hadn't switched years earlier.

You can effortlessly configure Neovim with Fennel nowadays.

This is a good example: https://github.com/nyoom-engineering/nyoom.nvim

The one trade-off is that it's not the first class language, so you still have to mentally translate from Lua to Fennel sometimes.

That's it? Just the configuration method? I thought you would go over a bunch of things that cannot be done in vim, but is possible with evil. And all I got was configuration language. And key remapping for that.

Disappointing.

Discussions about text editors are always useless... people express their opinion as if they were completely objective, but when pressed to explain it they come up with the most ridiculous little things. We should just all recognize it's all subjective preference.

One feature I really liked when I used evil, which wasn't present in vim, was search/replace with `s/` replicated the case in the replacement string. So `s/one/two/` would replace `One` with `Two`.

Great when you want to refactor a name that's used both as a variable and a CONSTANT in one go.

That's available in vim via the vim-abolish[0] plugin... which has other capabilities, but the one I take advantage of is case-preserving S/one/two/ which does what you want.

It's odd vim doesn't have that builtin, I'm half convinced it does and I just haven't dug enough to find it.

[0] https://github.com/tpope/vim-abolish

The editor component is also used in KWrite if you want a more minimal editor. I don't really use Kate itself but really like both KWrite and KDevelop.

one thing i missed from modern kde was tiling window management. but bismuth enables that. and it's absolutely great, with a ton of key bindings you can set yourself and some good mouse support if you need.

https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth/

It's not missing. Go System Settings → Workspace → Shortcuts (alternatively: run `kcmshell5 kcm_keys`) → System Services → KWin and configure the global keybindings for tiling to your taste.

I tried KDE recently on Fedora 37, and my workstation kept running out of memory (32 GB) due to its file indexer. I like KDE in general, but its quite heavy for my tastes.

You can disable file indexing. KDE is taking <1GB on my old laptop with 4G RAM. Its memory usage is comparable to Lxqt for me.

Is the file indexing a back end for Kfind, or for some other?

For some reason KDE on Fedora is somewhat broken.

Kubuntu worked flawlessly for 6 years on my laptop (and it's still going).

Weird, given there are a few prominent developers running Fedora KDE, such as Nate Graham of "This week in KDE"

I hear that, still, with a brand new install, there were various things "broken out of the box".

No idea why that's the case.

I think it got some funding from the EU.

Making it less visible would give the impression that EU funds are unappreciated and are allowed to go to waste.

I'm not aware of amy significant funding from the eu. The only funding we received was nlnet for a few small projects in neochat, okular, kaidam amd kmail regarding encryption support. And dome small funding from the german environment minister for the kde eco project. In all these cases, it's just enough to pay for part time work for a small amount of time.

https://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/Project+Summary.html

https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/027705

The 11.5 million EUR funding is the primary driver behind KDE‘s semantic desktop and the infamous file indexer.

Nepomuk, wasn't that ages ago? Ah yes, right at the top your link says:

  Start date 01. January 2006
  End date 31. December 2008

That sounds like a config snafu to be honest, even if it assumes you have swap on

I haven’t used KDE is several years, but I do use Gnome/Unity with Ubuntu and Fedora and while not entirely bug-free, I find them “adequate for full-time Linux use”.

What are the reasons to use KDE over Gnome, aside from that Android phone integration?

Generally more configuration options to set things up how you want them

Server-side window decorations

Developers that don't tell you to decide if you want to be a Gnome application or a Linux application

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