I’m not an IT professional or even expert. I’ve been using Geany for a decade, but recently I switched from a frugal setup to KDE Plasma, and decided that I want to use everything KDE has to offer as far as possible.
I’ve been using Kate for almost 3 months now, mostly for web development (Jinja), shell scripting and Markdown writing. It’s been a good experience overall, but it seems to have one or two shortcomings compared to Geany, which makes me wonder how Kate fares in the landscape of Linux code editors/IDEs.
To give a concrete example, Geany has this great feature for HTML that automatically creates a closing tag once I finish the opening one. E.g. I type <div>, and as soon as I type the , a closing </div> appears. Neat. That’s more than just automatically closing brackets. I see no Kate plugin that would do that.
There’ve been a few more niggles, I’ll edit the post - which I hope makes sense as a general question - when I remember them.
edit: Thanks for putting it all into perspective. Takeaways for me: 1) there’s also kdevelop, 2) need to figure out what LSP is, and 3) regarding alternatives it’s interesting to see which Archlinux has in its repositories and which are only AUR.
I went Sublime -> VSCode -> Kate and I’m definitely not going backwards.
On Linux I tried the fltapak versio of VSCodium. It was very slow to load and constantly crashed. At work I’m forced to use Windows, but I still prefer Kate over VSCode. I might be biased by my hatred for Microsoft, but Kate works great for me.
I’m open to trying other open source editors/ides. From this post it sounds like genie might be cool. But I’m generally happy with Kate so unlikely to try something else.
Next step Vim!
Yes, Kate is a great editor. My husband likes it very much, he writes his hobby AtariST/Amstrad code in it (some modern C too). He dislikes things like vim, he likes gui editors (despite being a linux guy since the '90s). Same for me.
I do most small edits in nano these days. Trying to switch to micro, nano’s syntax highlighting is far from perfect, and micro’s impressed me.
But if it’s something even slightly more complex I go for a GUI code editor.
Strangely, I much prefer writing Markdown with the GUI variant, too.
I had been using Kate for working on C++, Objective-C, and python projects both on macOS and Linux. I didn’t manage to get C++ debugging or the LSP integrations working, as it isn’t easy to figure out how to setup it up on different platforms.
In the last 6 months, I have switched over to Gram, and it is trivial to configure the LSPs and debuggers, and have since stopped using Kate.
Code editor? Eh, if you don’t like VSCode or any of the other ones.
Text editor? Yes, definitely! IMO it’s better than vim and Notepad++ if you’re coming from Windows.
It’s alright. I actually was on a similar, albeit just a month long, phase when I switched to KDE. I used VSCodium before and switched (back?) to VSCode after two weeks.
The main reason was extension support. I didn’t notice how much I leaned on those before switching. For example taking notes became more cumbersome and journaling in Typst became impossible (from the editor at least). I have been expecting a lot from my IDE that aren’t really its responsibilities.
Actually programming was a perfectly fine experience so I kept trying to make it work. But at some point a project required me to run dev containers. I had VSCode installed for that anyway so that was the end of it. Though by now I have basically completely switched to Neovim.
I recommend trying out Neovim (Maybe Emacs but I personally never tried it). Or if you prefer a GUI, or don’t want to learn their system, definitely give VSCodium or VSCode a shot. Those four have a much greater assortment of plugins so it’ll be a lot easier to get your editor to behave how you want it to. Though this comes at the cost of a higher memory and cpu footprint.
Man we’re the same person lol I too use geany for basically everything and tried out Kate because it felt more feature complete but it just isn’t. There is nothing I can do on Kate that I can’t do in Geany that is relevant to me. Mostly Lua programming and markdown editing.
I’d say just make a theme that fits the KDE style and use some breeze icons in the editor to make it feel more like it belongs and use what works and is comfortable.
I still use gnome and so I made a gnome builder editor theme and made the whole editor look like gnome builder and it works wonderfully. I bet the same is possible for kde.
I mean, yeah, it is a decent editor. It’s not the most feature-rich editor to ever exist and it doesn’t really have a plugin ecosystem to make up for it. But it’s relatively lightweight and thanks to LSP, the programming language support plays in a similar league to full-fledged IDEs.
If you need a GUI editor, Zed is pretty great. But I’m a Helix editor user in the terminal.
If thinking about zed, Gram is a mandatory mention. https://gram.liten.app/
This is really nice. I never heard of it before.
🦀
I’ve used it before when trying out IDEs. Its really good, its a no bullshit solution to VS code. If you’ve used sublime text, Kate is similar to that as it is quite minimal.
On a spectrum of minimalisim and memory consumption, you have emacs, Vi, VIM at the lower end of the curve. This is for users to customize or to use the smallest memory footprint, than in the median its kdevelop/Kate sublime, and VS codium, and on the far end of spectrum you have your bloat software VS code and ItelliJ idea.
Personally I’m using Vim for my projects in C, C++, Python, octave scripts, sh scripts, and markdown. I like to keep my memory footprint small which is why I use a text editor over a full blown IDE. I have used amd’s Vitis IDE for embedded systems (which is just a fork of VS codium).
kdevelop
Huh, yet another KDE app. Installed now. Seems to be just as suitable for my needs as Kate even though it says to be centered around C/C++.
Unlike Kateit has something called LSP which might help with automatically adding closing tags; but I have yet to figure out how to activate this. — Huh, Kate has this too. Reading up on it in the Archwiki now.VS Code/Codium seems to be omnipresent when diving into the topic, but I just don’t like that it’s controlled by MS, even if these are opensource.
Would installing a HTML LSP for Kate solve your closing tag issue if you haven’t already?
What’s an LSP here?
edit: OK this has come up a lot in this post. reading up on it, installing packages. Hopefully it’s not too hard to get it to work.
Language server protocol. You run a little server on the side that lets your editor know about syntax, warnings, errors. Saves you a compile attempt.
Yeah, from what I read online, it should suggest tag names. So, you type
<f, then it should suggest<footer>and when you press Enter, that should insert the opening and closing tag. So, not quite the same, but also an upgrade in a way…
Sure, yes, auto-completion/-closing brackets, smart indendation, are standard features of most code editors. Kate also has a LSP plugin and external programs are easily setup. And features like ctrl+b to mark a line, i found no good extension in vscodium.
This from kwrite.
kwrite
Huh, yet another KDE app. It seems they all build on the same base, with increasing feature richness:
Kwrite => Kate => Kdevelop
?
I wouldn’t use “=>”…they serve different purposes. But yes, they are all build with the same editor components (ktexteditor). Kwrite for example has no tab support…making it not really useful for editing more than one file at a time…but is simpler to use so rather useful for quick config file editing.
Kate is a full fledged text editor with plugin and LSP support. So it can serve as editor for programming but also as editor for other tasks that require some organizing and multiple files.
kdevelop is a IDE. It includes a lot more tools that aren’t strictly editor related (for example tools for easier looking through git patches before submitting them) but it is pretty much only geared towards programming (and there for specific languages like c, cpp, python or php)
Not mention…but kile is a editor specified on creating latex document which also uses the same editor component.
Kwrite for example has no tab support
Wait, sure does? And i’m on XFCE (Gtk) here, not full integrarion and stuff. But it has no IDE features or plugins, which Kate has. And “light”, it’s more of a Notepad++ than a Metapad/Mousepad.
Sometimes I use neovim, sometimes I use Emacs (so I can make both camps equally angry). Why Kate, not one of the heavyweights? Or Helix, if you want something modern and low hassle?
