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Kate editor on all platforms
- cullmann 2y ago[dead]
- riidom 2y agoCan we stop downvoting the OP for giving a tldr of their submission :)
- eropple 2y agoThe author wrote the post and already provided a different HN post title than the article title. That tl;dr (which isn't, it doesn't communicate a meaningful takeaway) could have been lightly edited into the HN submission title in the first place.
- account42 2y agoI love Kate's text edit component used in KWrite, KDevvelop (and Kile) but never really had much of a use for Kate itself. It's a weird step between a text editor and an IDE.
- riidom 2y agoKate 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.
- shrimp_emoji 2y agoLike Dolphin is even better than Explorer, Kate is even better than Notepad++!
- topato 2y agoThat 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.
- copperx 2y agoThe fix is a checkbox away in the np++ settings dialog. That just goes to show that defaults are incredibly powerful.
- account42 2y agoThat'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.
- tredre3 2y agoYou can disable that in the settings, it's under the "Backup" category.
- gerdesj 2y agoN++ 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 ...
- Smar 2y agoKwrite nowadays supports tabs. Try if it fits to your purpose now.
- 2y ago
- p4bl0 2y agoIf 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.
- binkHN 2y agoI absolutely love KWrite to do something in a pinch!
- calvinmorrison 2y agoWhich 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.
- doubled112 2y agoWas that what they called KParts? Terminal, file browser, text editor, more, all easy to embed and build an application around?
- jraph 2y agoYep. Still current I think.
- calvinmorrison 2y agoYes exactly! I forgot to mention dcop a message passing forerunner to dbus as well as arts the forerunner to pulsaudioe
- ecef9-8c0f-4374 2y agodcop was better. easy to use and accessible for non developer. I scripted so many dcop bash scripts. I never connected with dbus.
- 2y ago
- kzrdude 2y agoGedit with lots of plugins did the same for me in the early gnome 2 days.
- qiqitori 2y agoToo 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.
- SuaveSteve 2y agoNo. 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.
- The_Colonel 2y agoAh, 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.
- nazgulsenpai 2y agoI 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.
- spookie 2y agoLove Kate! Given I _had_ to use Windows on my last job, I promptly installed it. Need multicursor shenanigans, and the lovely search & replace. Had some trouble with the default theme however (flashbang everytime I opened it). But, a nightly build solved that.
- pushedx 2y agoFor some reason I expected this article to be a horror story of bad behavior from the new community upon porting to other platforms (complaints about the port etc.), and how it wasn't worth the effort. Glad to see that it's mostly a status update and a call for contributions.
- itsautomatisch 2y agoKate has been a really good replacement for stuff like VSCode or BBEdit, but it's still got some rough edges on macOS in my experience. I mostly use it on Linux, and the LSP support is actually pretty good. It's definitely a barebones experience without all of the plugin support other editors might have, but if you just need something for writing scripts or editing files it should fit the bill.
- presbyterian 2y agoKate is such an impressive editor, I’m glad that it’s being worked on and ported to other operating systems, and I didn’t know it had LSP support now! Good to see! If anything happens to BBEdit, Kate may be my next move
- bayindirh 2y agoI'm using KATE on Linux and BBEdit in macOS to develop in Golang mainly. Kate is snappy, robust and feature packed. It's my go to tool when I don't need a full-blown IDE.
- leejoramo 2y agoNow I am interested BBEdit is the default editor for me. I say this has someone who has used BBEdit since around 1997. And while for the last 15 years I have moved on to primarily using Sublime and then VSCode, I always configure them to be as close to BBEdit as possible, though I can never match BBEdit’s Single/Multi-File Search and Replace or Compare features. Similarity dispute macOS being my favorite Desktop Environment, KDE has been my primary development DE for the past 2 years. So I really need to give Kate a chance.
- speakspokespok 2y agoDoes anybody know why Kate wants to install pulseaudio on OpenBSD? This would be a perfect IDE. kate-23.08.4:libltdl-2.4.2p2: ok useradd: Warning: home directory `/var/run/pulse' doesn't exist, and -m was not specified kate-23.08.4:pulseaudio-17.0p0: ok kate-23.08.4:pcaudiolib-1.2: ok kate-23.08.4:espeak-1.51p2: ok kate-23.08.4:dotconf-1.3p0: ok kate-23.08.4:py3-xdg-0.28p2: ok kate-23.08.4:speech-dispatcher-0.11.5: ok
- ognarb 2y agoFor text to speech.
- cullmann 2y agoYeah, that seems to be the likely reason. But I am not sure why that ends up with pulse. But I am not the OpenBSD packager for that.
- tedunangst 2y agoOpenbsd pkg dependencies tend to be fairly coarse grained, so if you depend on KDE, you get all of KDE.
- speakspokespok 2y agothank you for the useful reply. :-)
- speakspokespok 2y agoFor the few people that might be looking for a light IDE option for OpenBSD Geany is available and works really well.
- aspyct 2y agoKate was my first code editor on Linux. Learned PHP and python on it. I still have nostalgia with the pink syntax coloring it has (had?) for python! Thanks a lot to all the contributors, sure had an impact on my life!
- ixaxaar 2y agoI wrote a part of the kernel (uitron) for Toshiba SSDs that went into macbooks around 2013 on kate. It was my first and favorite editor :D
- heavyset_go 2y agoKate + LSP servers can get you really far as a pseudo-IDE. It's one of my favorite editors. If you want to use it on other platforms, though, you have to dig around Gitlab build artifacts to grab recent successful builds. Looks like that may have changed.
- dec0dedab0de 2y agoIf anyone is looking for a topic of a blog entry, I would like to see an analysis of the code/toolchain differences for projects like this that have patches for many different architectures and operating systems.
- nonrandomstring 2y agoKate is a lovely editor. I wrote about half of Designing Sound with Kate before switching to Emacs near the end (to better handle code integration). What I appreciate is the ability to have a pane of files open and very quickly cut and paste between them. Even though I am a baptised and confirmed Emacs disciple, I still never find the buffer orientation quite maps to files the way I want. Kate hit that sweet-spot in a file based workflow,
- waqar144 2y agoKate has good code integration these days, but it depends on the language. Might not be great for some languages.
- Lyngbakr 2y agoI'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?
- IshKebab 2y agoIt'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++.
- sneak 2y agovim 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.
- nequo 2y agoEmacs is not TUI. Its main frontend is GUI, you can display images, play videos, read PDFs in it if you want to.
- karmajunkie 2y agoCome 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.
- nequo 2y agoHistorically 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.
- vrinsd 2y agoI've been using Kate on macOS and Windows for sometime and it's outstanding this is possible (a cross-platform KDE app). Kate of course on Linux kicks ass as well. One stupid question: Is anyone aware of how to change the UI "theme" if you're running Kate on macOS or Windows? The 2D, flat icons really look horrible to me.
- vrinsd 2y agoProbably like most people here you end up with a collection of tools, so glad Kate exists and really appreciate the high quality and amazing features. Years past you'd have to pay for things like UltraEdit and fight licenses, etc which are a nightmare if you cross boundaries with big companies. I find myself using Kate, Geany and Notepad++ at different points in time for different tasks across my Windows/macOS/Linux machines. Kate surprised me a few months ago, I had to write assembly for a fully custom processor whose ISA is not at all industry standard. Kate was able to do the syntax highlighting and with the right color theme and "double-click to highlight" it made the non-trivial changes I needed to make a LOT easier than anything else (VSCode/VSCodium included).
- wkat4242 2y agoI love the whole KDE toolchain and plasma as well. I donate monthly. It's so much more useful to me than the opinionated design of gnome.
- dang 2y agoRelated. Others? Kate Editor Features - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37231529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37231529 - Aug 2023 (18 comments) Integrated Terminal on Windows in KDE Kate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34824467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34824467 - Feb 2023 (1 comment) Kate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34697173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34697173 - Feb 2023 (23 comments) Kate – New Features – August 2022 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32585221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32585221 - Aug 2022 (1 comment) Kate 22.08 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32219281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32219281 - July 2022 (6 comments) Kate is a fantastic text editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29623909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29623909 - Dec 2021 (1 comment) KDE Advanced Text Editor: A Feature-Packed Text Editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26972858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26972858 - April 2021 (1 comment) Kate Editor: Search In Files and Multi-Threading - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25969409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25969409 - Jan 2021 (1 comment) The Kate Text Editor in 2020 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25592677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25592677 - Dec 2020 (5 comments) The Kate text editor is 20 years old - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25424735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25424735 - Dec 2020 (81 comments) Kate is soon 20 years old - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25030096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25030096 - Nov 2020 (12 comments) Kate – A Qt Text Editor for Linux, MacOS and Windows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16558407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16558407 - March 2018 (2 comments) Kate Turning 10 Years Old - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2876471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2876471 - Aug 2011 (20 comments)
- andmarios 2y agoKate was one of the main reasons I switched to Linux in 2004/2005. I had a lab in MySQL, and back then, the only option to develop in Windows was MySQL Workbench, which was as heavy as it got. Running an SQL statement was painfully slow, and iteration cycles were huge. In Linux, you would write your SQL in Kate, and run MySQL's cli in the embedded terminal. Once ready, you would click the button “pipe to terminal". Instant run. What took many minutes in Windows took less than 2 seconds in Linux. How can you not love this? Another reason was Amarok, an (the) mp3 player. Do you like how Spotify and other providers create automatically infinite playlists, radios, etc based on your tastes? Yes, KDE had this since 2002 I think? It was first copied by iTunes, then by Spotify, and now is considered a standard function. :)
- jchmbrln 2y agoYes! When I started using Kate on Linux ca. 2005, I was coming from Notepad on Windows and couldn’t believe how nice it was. I believe it was my first experience of syntax highlighting. And Amarok! I haven’t thought of that in a while. Losing Amarok was my single biggest regret when I became a Max user. I’ve not used anything since that came close.
- doubled112 2y agoWhat about Clementine or Strawberry? Clementine was a fork of Amarok 1.4, and Strawberry a fork of Clementine. I recently discovered Strawberry would play music off of my Subsonic server (Navidrome really) and was thrilled to have something for music that didn't feel like a web app.
- bluGill 2y agoAmarok is preparing for another release. I wonder if it will come to mac.
- tvshtr 2y agoYeah, that's a surprising revival. I thought it died for good this time.
- kldx 2y agoKate is the snappiest editor I have tried. This is just anecdata - the keystroke latency feels better than the other mainstream editors I use.
- whalesalad 2y agoKate is a surprisingly epic editor. It’s not my primary (vscode) but I use it often to just preview a plaintext file the same way I might use vim or sublime. Love the native rainbow columns in CSV.
- glyphy177 2y ago[dead]
- m0guz 2y ago> Even if that is a non-free platform, we can reach out to new users and developers that might later be then even interested to switch a full open platform. KDE developers have always been great with their vision. I guess they will try to create OS Shell that sync users data between different OS? Their applications cover 99% of the casual users, with KDE Connect [0]. KDE Plasma has never clicked with me but KDE applications have always been my choice in a Linux system because of their responsiveness. Dolphin for Windows[1] also exists but has some issues. [0] https://apps.kde.org/kdeconnect/ https://apps.kde.org/kdeconnect/ [1] https://cdn.kde.org/ci-builds/system/dolphin/master/windows/ https://cdn.kde.org/ci-builds/system/dolphin/master/windows/
- cullmann 2y agoKDE applications still need a lot love on non X11/Wayland systems. Kate got some polish in the last years on Windows, the macOS version still needs more.
- ukuina 2y agoKate is awesome and has been my default editor on KDE for decades. Pleasantly surprised it is available elsewhere!
- cullmann 2y agoThanks :)
- seba_dos1 2y agoThe only problem I have with Kate these days is... its icon. It's been there for years now, and yet my mind still just stops for a noticeable bunch of milliseconds whenever it has to recognize it. For some reason it looks like it represents some brand's useless mobile app rather than a proper utility and my mind somehow refuses to associate it with Kate.
- Zambyte 2y agoWhy not change it?
- cullmann 2y agoBefore we had that, we had a icon that just looked like a text file mime type with zero recognizably. Even if you used it for a week, you would not be able to know which application is running just looking at the icon. Could be any editor or some word processor. With the current one, it is clear. And yes, I think that makes sense, that is a brand. And it is what most other applications do, too. I doubt my mother has any idea what e.g. the Chromium icon means, but once seen a few times, it is clearly recognizable.
- seba_dos1 2y agoAll I can see at first glance is a blue circle with some not very well-defined shape on it and generic mobile-style shadow. When I zoom it up, I can appreciate that it's a somewhat abstract rendition of the cyber woodpecker, but after all this time (and I'm talking years, not a week) I'm still not seeing it at first glance when the icon is small. It's just a blue circle that, unlike Chromium's icon with its distinct dot in the middle, gets lost among other circles. I think the issue I have with it isn't with the "logo" shape itself, but rather with how it's embedded into and composed within an icon. I think it could work well on something else than a plain circle. Maybe even just improving the shadow and adjusting color shades to make it more contrast-y could already help.
- karunamurti 2y agoI wish they support mac keybinding, but I never seem to get it right.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rubymamis 2y agoWhy does the macOS binary needs to be 450MB if it's not an Electron app? My Qt app (also a text editor) is 140MB. And I can trim that quite a bit more.
- diffeomorphism 2y agoWhere are you reading 450? I am only seeing 139? https://cdn.kde.org/ci-builds/utilities/kate/master/macos-arm64/ https://cdn.kde.org/ci-builds/utilities/kate/master/macos-ar...
- rubymamis 2y agoThat is compressed.
- cullmann 2y agoSimple reason: Because the package is not optimized for that. It can be shrinked more, but that needs help. And I must confess, I rather spend my time on bug fixes than space optimizations.
- rubymamis 2y agoHey, Kate is awesome! Didn't mean to bring you down or anything. I myself got some trimming to do for my own apps. Keep up the good work. BTW, any idea how Kate is so fast? Is there an architecture explanation somewhere? Is it based on Scintilla? I'm on a block editor[1] in Qt C++ and QML so that kind of information will be helpful. [1] https://www.get-plume.com/ https://www.get-plume.com/
- waqar144 2y agothe architecture is really simple. The buffer contigously stores a list of "blocks". Each block contains a small number of actual text lines (usually 64-128). Thus if you edit a line, we only need to update the block containing the line. Once a block grows bigger than a certain number of lines, we split it into two.
- patorick002 2y agoI logged in solely to say that Kate was the main reason I stuck with KDE as my desktop environment, back in the KDE 3 days. I switched to Mac some time ago but I still use Kate as my editor. I'm happy that it still exists.
- brabel 2y agoKate on MacOS is terrible. I've tried helping them fix the shortcuts which are all "wrong" (MacOS uses certain shortcuts that are unlike most Unix systems, but Kate doesn't actually use the right ones all Mac users expect so it's a nightmare until you manually override at least some of the shortcuts yourself). I tried using the build tool (suggested in the article) but building Kate was a nightmare even with that... I had to give up after a few days trying random things as suggested by people on the Kate chat (each build was taking hours, then finally failing with some completely inscrutable error). Even though I really enjoyed using Kate on Linux, as a mainly Mac user I had to forget about it and keep using emacs for random stuff, and IntelliJ for Java/Kotlin/Groovy/Dart and anything else well supported by Jetbrains.
- diffeomorphism 2y agoThat sounds more like switching to macos being terrible. If I am used to kate on linux, windows,..., then I expect it to just work if someone hands me a mac with kate. If you additionally want mac-style shortcuts as an option that is fine, but defaults should be consistent.
- brabel 2y agoThere's no app that uses the same shortcuts in all OSs because that's just stupid (amongst other reasons, because the shortcuts would conflict with the OS's own shortcuts, just to mention one obvious reason). You need to default to the OS's defaults, and maybe have an option to try using another OS's defaults (like other IDEs do).
- cullmann 2y ago
- donatj 2y agoIt’s been a long time since I have used Kate. I see it is stealing design elements from VSCode just like JetBrains UIs decided to. That really disappoints me. I really don’t get the point of doing so. If I wanted to use VSCode, I’d use VSCode rather than the knock off. Why not have a distinct visual identity for crying out loud.
- PurpleRamen 2y agoWhich part is it copying?
- cullmann 2y agoI see no issue in getting inspiration from other programs. All projects do that, and I think that benefits the users. Code has semantic highlighting via LSP, that is something KDevelop had before Code or Atom existed. Same for the 'go to everywhere' that most likely was first in Sublime. :) Perhaps even some features from Kate did inspire others, it is not that young.
- waqar144 2y agobecause its not very easy to come up with new designs, at least for me. On the other hand if another tool provides a good and easy to understand UI, copying it makes sense. Kate still has a lot of its own things and ideas.
- zem 2y agoI really loved the overall design and functionality of kate back in the day, but I also really loved vim as my actual editor. kept hoping that the vimpart (vim embedded in kate as the editor component) would actually go somewhere, but it never did.
- w4rh4wk5 2y agoI like it. Good work! Thank you!