Comment by p4bl0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by p4bl0 | Hacker News Reader

A lot of editors are being discussed here but I see nobody has mentioned Kate (KDE's Advanced Text Editor) [1] in the conversation yet, so I'm doing it. Kate is a very mature and capable editor, and even if I only use it on Linux I'm glad to know that it is also available on macOS and Windows. It natively supports LSP and has much, much more to offer in terms of project management, support for build system, support for working with Git (it's actually the only Git GUI that I found to be usable), SQL databases integration, and of course, advanced editing features. I started using it a few years back after a very long text editor journey: on Windows a bit more than 20 years ago: Notepad, HAPedit, then Notepad++ ; then I got a Mac and used TextMate (which introduced me to powerful text editors) for a few years ; then I switched to Linux ~15 years ago and used Gedit for a few months before diving head deep into Emacs and stayed fully there for… 12+ years (I actually still use it from time to time, but it's less and less the case and most importantly I stopped doing everything in it including my email, social networking, IRC, etc.) ; and now for a few years I've mainly been using Kate (and Kwrite for quick edits + Nano [2] in the terminal or on remote hosts). I even contributed a few features [3] to the project, KDE developers are very welcoming!

[1] https://kate-editor.org/

[2] I must say here too that Nano is actually an underappreciated gem. It supports a lot more features than people generally imagine: syntax hilighting, line numbering, auto-indent, multi buffers, mouse support, keyboard macros, … it's actually a decent simple code editor!

[3] https://kate-editor.org/post/2022/2022-08-24-kate-new-featur...

I agree that Kate is a good code editor. I have tried more than a year ago when I still use KDE Plasma (now switched to Gnome). Honestly, I am happy that there is at least one GUI Code Editor from a big community that actually on par with some popular code editor (VS Code, Sublime, etc). Because I see that most code editors made by the Linux community are always lacking in features when compared to other popular code editors. However, there are some things that make me not use Kate as my daily editor. One of them is the file browser feature which I find more complicated than its alternatives in Sublime Text or VSCode for example. In addition, the small number of plugins for Kate is also one of the reasons I do not use it.

Kate is the only even remotely close alternative to Notepad++ for me. Close enough that I maintain a personal fork stripping out all the stuff I don't use and modifying a few small things to my preferences (e.g. load/save sessions from file menu, no need for 'session manager'.

If you like Kate you should check out kdevelop. It uses Kate as a core and expands on it.

Much more project management tools and more advanced IDE-isms. It's primarily for C++ but, of course, has all the LSP support of Kate.

You can follow definitions, visually set breakpoints, automatically lint your code, etc. But one of my favorite rare features is the Class Browser. Being able to visually see a class hierarchy is very valuable, particularly for GUI libs and stuff of that nature that really leans into inheritance.

Yes, it's a great editor. It's one of the members of "Great, but Unknown Tools" group.

I use it for mainly writing small Go programs in these days. Bigger projects are promoted to Eclipse.

I’m using Kate to write posts on https://oilshell.org! After a detour through many other tools, it’s great to find something open source and high quality.

I use vim to edit code, but I like copying and pasting paragraphs of prose with a mouse. I didn’t realize that until doing a lot of writing.

After Kate was ported to Qt4, I was very impressed that it could handle extremely large files with no sweat. I don't use it, because I need a remote development capabilities and when compared to Neovim it simply lacks the plugin ecosystem and a large community driving it forward.

I've had issues with kate loosing unsaved files, as well as lagging on large files due to the automatic text wrapping

I've replaced unsaved files in Kate with obsidian.md personally, as there if there is somewhere I can type, I know it will be persisted to disk.

I use kate a lot when I need to inspect a huge file. Love the built-in rainbow rendering of columns for a CSV. Definitely a solid editor considering it is free and open source. I haven't done any serious dev with it though.

Vim has also started to do the the rainbow thing for CSV recently (around version 9.1.672).

Kate can be great but it's riddled with bugs and advertised features that a completely broken(like sessions)

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