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Comment by Lyngbakr | Hacker News Reader

I'd never heard of Kate and wondered if someone could explain what Kate's differentiator is versus other popular editors (e.g., Vim, Emacs, VSCode)? Is there something in particular that sets it apart or is it just a matter of taste?

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My favourite Kate feature is sessions. Whatever your working on, you can save the session - including all open files and editor layouts, and restore it later on.

This is a killer feature in (n)vim as well. I had been trying out emacs + evil for some months at one point (was previously a vim user), but never got session restores working well at all. With vim it all restores, it's in the right spot, and even remote files opened with the scp:// syntax reopen perfectly. No plugins needed. I just use one session with the default filename of Session.vim, so a quick `nvim -S` gets me back in action and I don't mind restarting my editor much at all. With emacs I'd dread it and it was one of the worst parts of a session restart or reboot.

Highly recommend anyone see if their favorite editor can do sessions.

Woah, I've been using Neovim as my main editor for a few months at this point and didn't know it supports sessions. This is awesome, thanks!

I suppose its a bit of several reasons: for sure taste, but also features, performance, etc. Its a GUI-based text editor, and not a big full-fledged IDE like VSCode. In my opinion, it pretty much follows the KDE philosophy (that I'll poorly paraphrase here) in that: using it and its features in their default settings will be totally fine to use as-is, but - like KDE Plasma for example - there are plenty of features that you can also unlock way beyond the default in order to allow for lots of customization and flexibility. It also is lightweight on resources considering its number of available features; closer to VIM, and lots lighter-weight than say VSCode. Many people would categorize Kate with other text editors like Geany, Notepad++, etc...and I agree with that categorization. Not sure if that helps! Then again, you could always check out some vidoes of Kate in use on youtube, or, if so inclined, perhaps try installing it and give it a run?

I've been using Kate for long time. I try other things but seem to gravitate back to Kate.

It's relatively resource efficient and fast, very full-featured, open source, and I can use it on different OSes and it's pretty much the same everywhere. Also it's GUI, and has a standard GUI UX.

I've never really had any problems with it at all until I started using it on ARM MacOS, where there were some weird bugs with filenames during saves (no corruption or anything, but would default to weird things and occasionally crash if the "wrong" filenames were used); but then the most recent major version seemed to fix all the problems.

I didn't know I could use it on MacOS. I recently started a new job where they have nothing but Mac, so I've been looking for a text editor that can do what Kate does. Everything seems to want to do 101 things before basic text editing, rather than just be a simple text editor with optional functionality, so I'm really excited to have Kate installed. I'm really hoping I don't run into too many issues as I've used Kate for years on my home & work setups and would really like to continue using it on mac now.

It's a lot lighter and faster than full IDEs like VSCode, and it also uses a modern GUI unlike Vim and Emacs. It's more like Notepad++.

vim and emacs are TUI; Kate is a GUI app.

VSCode is a full-fledged IDE; Kate is much simpler. Think of it as comparable to TextEdit or notepad.exe, but with more features.

It's definitely trending in the VSCode direction, but VSCode is full of surveillance and corporate API clients, and Kate is not.

Emacs is not TUI. Its main frontend is GUI, you can display images, play videos, read PDFs in it if you want to.

Come again? Most people install the windowed version of it today, but its history is very definitely TUI-based. All of the features you mentioned are things that have been added along the way as its container was able to support them.

Historically being TUI-centric doesn’t mean that it is not GUI today, right?

It supports all your fonts, font ligatures, varying font sizes inside the same buffer, renders images inside your buffers, all without relying on a terminal emulator or Sixel support. Sounds fundamentally not TUI to me.

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