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Comment by riidom | Hacker News Reader

Kate was, beside Dolphin one of my earliest and most positively surprising discoveries on KDE.

Kate fulfills for me the role that Np++ had back in the windows days. I use it when I want to work file based and not project- or directory based.

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If you need to work file based and not project or directory based then you should probably be using Kwrite, which literary is a stripped down version of Kate specifically for this purpose.

I absolutely love KWrite to do something in a pinch!

Which shows how far ahead KDE was even in 3.5 times with reusable embeddable components that were highly engineered. For example Konqueror has a long list of plugins including calling kwrite to render inside of it. The early kio tooling that predates fuse in having universal access through a single file viewer.

Was that what they called KParts? Terminal, file browser, text editor, more, all easy to embed and build an application around?

Yep. Still current I think.

Yes exactly! I forgot to mention dcop a message passing forerunner to dbus as well as arts the forerunner to pulsaudioe

dcop was better. easy to use and accessible for non developer. I scripted so many dcop bash scripts. I never connected with dbus.

And it is so frustrating to see how unknown and neglected KParts is

In what way is it neglected? It works, no need for pointless churn.

Also while it might not be known to users (why would it need to be), it is used in various KDE programs where it makes sense.

And it seems konqueror is the only browser today that can split a tab into multiple panes! I used this a lot in 3.5 times. It still works, just need to file another bug report for sane dnd behavior..

Vivaldi does this if I recall correctly

It does indeed

KHTML also led to WebKit then Blink.

Like Dolphin is even better than Explorer, Kate is even better than Notepad++!

That is a wild accusation. I need to install a nightly of Kate and give it another chance, if it's truly as good as you say. Np++ is starting to annoy me, with it's constant reopening of like 50 files every time it's started lol.

The fix is a checkbox away in the np++ settings dialog. That just goes to show that defaults are incredibly powerful.

That's not a fix if you still want to be notified when files change under you but without a modal that prevents you from doing anything else (including closing the file it's nagging you about). Kate (or any other application using Kate's editor component) does this much better by displaying a non-modal notification bar at the top of the editor similar to how browsers have implemented non-modal notifications.

You can disable that in the settings, it's under the "Backup" category.

N++ can tail and follow files and colour code the output. Smashing!

Kate recently opens a default start page which I now find annoying. Kate also opens all previously opened files by default.

All of these things are defaults that are easy to override but changing defaults can be annoying, especially when you have been used the previous defaults for more than a decade ...

Kwrite nowadays supports tabs. Try if it fits to your purpose now.

The last time I checked Kate could not do basic line operations like remove empty lines, duplicate line etc.

It does all of that now.

If you use Help > Find Action you can find stuff like that easier than hunting through the menus.

The actions for those are called "Remove Empty Lines" and "Remove Duplicate Lines"

Awesome thank you

I found notepadqq to be a near drop-in replacement for my use of Notepad++ (mostly the visible line endings, find/replace extended characters like \n & \t). The interface is near-identical.

It hasn't been updated in a couple years but haven't run into any bugs in a year+ use.

Gedit with lots of plugins did the same for me in the early gnome 2 days.

Too bad that gedit is utter garbage now. Lol Gnome. My pet rabbit gets confused when there are too many features so let's remove them all.

No. No. No. You have it wrong, my friend. The entire thing, like systemd and wayland, is a glorified excuse to reinvent the wheel so that a fresh batch of wizards can continue the cycle.

Ah, this thought stopping argument again.

X11 is garbage which nobody wants to maintain, let alone develop. It's a very archaic design which is patched via extensions to sorta support some modern concepts which negate the network transparency anyway.

Both Wayland and systemd have a very wide developer consensus, because they finally provide a maintainable solution to their respective problems. The drama is constructed by a small minority of contrarians.

Old does not mean bad. Even a decade later Wayland struggles to provide basic features that were built in the X protocol.

When rewriting apps, people have a tendency to say: "well, Oldversion provides X. We could make a Newversion that provides X better, but that's hard so maybe X is actually bad? We should provide Y instead." Then they're confused when nobody with X needs wants to use Newversion.

Which ones do you have in mind? I don't miss X in the slightest.

Xmodmap

It's OK to use X until Wayland has support for the missing features. I don't really care what I'm running. But it's clear that X is not in shape to see significant development (e.g. to support new needs) in the coming decades.

Wayland might have some developer consensus for the base protocol. Not so much for extensions to make it actually usable on a desktop. By the time it does it will be a patchwork as complex as X11 - it's already getting there with things like requiring PipeWire for simple things like capturing the screen.

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