Only in some backward countries can you vote before you're allowed to drink. Which only hurts democracy as you can't celebrate or forget the results of the first election you participate in.
I remember firing up Kate on my first Linux install ever - a dual boot with Windows 98SE and Suse 7.2! I keep meaning to fire that up in a VM but haven’t found the ISOs yet.
On Vim, ":set mouse" enables the use of the rodent inside the application. See ":help mouse" for more information.
If it's set to "n" (for "normal mode") or "a" (for "all modes"), it pretty much does what you're mentioning: one can instantly move the cursor to a given spot; use the scroll wheel to scroll the document, and (via netrw or any other file explorer or side-bar plugin) double-click to open a different file.
As someone who primarily uses vim, I've never been able to use its mouse mode. There's something that feels off about it -- when selecting text with the mouse, it feels very imprecise somehow.
If someone wanted good mouse support, I'm not sure it'd cut it. I prefer keyboard selection myself, but there are times mouse selection is faster, and I usually use not-vim for that.
If you select text with the mouse, then press delete, does the selected extent of text get deleted from the buffer (i.e., the in-memory copy of the file)?
Same reason there's a thriving market of other editors really, horses for courses. People use best what they use most, sometimes they make a conscious decision about it and sometimes they just fall into it. I imagine that a lot of tools are just used without much questioning, and that's fine. The basic feature sets of text editors are pretty much the same. Write, delete, move, copy, paste, save, create.
The main benefit is about choice, I keep a stack of text editors around just out of curiosity, because I like playing with software and editors and sometimes you find features you think are neat, and then go off to try and replicate them in your main editor or tool. Open source software is good at communicating ideas and text editors as a whole have really improved each other over the last three or four decades.
Kate isn't a particularly good editor and it's scripting language is quite lacking.
The reasons both Emacs and Vim have a Qt version as well instead of purely relying on a terminal protocol are obvious:
- ability to have fonts of different sizes
- ability to listen to more complicated keyboard shortcuts
- cleaner ways of opening popups
- ability to combine multiple fonts
- support for more colors
The downside of such a more complex protocol is that it's more involved to tunnel it over a network and doing attaching to X11 is also quite a bit more complicated than doing it to a terminal program.
As I recall, Kate is quite similar to Windows editors. It should be more familiar to users that have switched over to Linux from Windows, while still being quite feature rich. It is definitely a valuable editor in the Linux ecosystem
Accessibility (I'm thinking blind / partially sighted) -- while a terminal is technically accessible, it is not a great experience.
There are some blind people who do use, and love, vim/Emacs, bit GUI editors which integrate with their OSes accessibility features are usually a better experience.
If you want an example, sometimes for errors vim prints something at the bottom, it's not clear to a screen reader if it should go read that, and why.
It's a simple, lightweight text editor that doesn't require abstruse knowledge to use.
Im not particularly overawed with emacs or vim features. I've seen some people give breathless demos explaining how cool it was that they could do certain things and not felt especially impressed, especially given the learning curve. They seemed to be optimizing for things I don't need to optimize for.
Before I learned vim all those years ago, it was really convenient to use Kate with fish (sftp) to "mount" and edit remote files.
I would use this to edit HTML, CSS, and JS (and later PHP) on my FreeBSD servers which hosted my websites.
Once I learned revision control (hg mercurial) I largely stopped modifying files directly on the remote host so I had less of a need for an sftp client built into my text editor.
I used Kate fulltime up to the moment that I moved away from KDE due to the KDE3.0 fiasco. I took that moment to finally really learn Vim.
Kate is lightweight yet versatile; despite what the screenshots might suggest. This is due to the extremely well-done integration in KDE: for example, the file browser is (was?) really just the file browser konqueror from KDE, Kate has to do hardly anything for that, just "wrap" it. Same for syntax highlighting, terminal, snippets, keybindings, windows chrome, and so on. Kate is really mostly a neat wrapper around a lot of existing KDE parts and libs (and that is an achievement, I don't mean that negatively).
With Vim, I often say "Unix is my IDE", with Kate that could be translated to "the Desktop Environment is your IDE".
I don't use Kate, but lately I've been using VS code instead of vim. Well, I do minor/quick single file edits in vim but more and more I use VS code.
I'm just faster doing things like cutting/pasting between multiple files, splitting screens, multi-line cursors, with a GUI text editor over vim.
No, I'm not interested in putting even more time into time/effort/space-in-my-memory/etc into learning vim's keyboard combos to effectively do this stuff.
1. There are a lot of users that are just not comfortable with working at a shell prompt. Graphical editors mirror the basic Mac or Windows workflow (open folder, double click on file, edit) and key bindings.
2. Syntax highlighting & formatting is better because of support for multiple fonts & better control of color.
3. Integration with other graphical apps. Kate is used as a component inside of many other KDE tools, so when you edit a file, the behavior is consistent and the key bindings are consistent.
4. Better integration with the desktop environment (in this case KDE). For example, I can open a file on a remote machine from the file open dialog. The file open dialog isis keychain aware, and can connect to any host that the desktop environment can (with KDE, that is almost anything that has file-like objects and remote protocol). You can do some editor be able to open a message from an IMAP server like I'm browsing files on localhost.
Kate is more like a Notepad++ or TextWrangler on Mac. It's a solid editor, but not an Emacs, vim, or VSCode level.
> 1. There are a lot of users that are just not comfortable with working at a shell prompt. Graphical editors mirror the basic Mac or Windows workflow (open folder, double click on file, edit) and key bindings.
Emacs has nothing to do with shell prompts. It's a GUI editor as well. Emacs philosophy goes against Unix. I e.g. never use the terminal mode. Otherwise, your points seem on-point.
For me the most important benefits of GUI text editor are:
1. Selection and system clipboard integration.
2. Ability to quickly scroll to look something without moving the cursor, then return where I was by pressing an arrow key (one of the largest pain points of emacs for me).
3. Proportional fonts with proper text rendering, especially for notes.
I use 1 and 2 almost on a subconscious level, and it's hard for me to be productive in an editor which doesn't support these features. I'm sure, vim users can relate.
Yeah, I used GUI emacs on and off for more than a decade, most recently — for a couple of months as a primary editor and email client. Emacs with gcc+pgtk patches feels great. Unfortunatley, due to scrolling and, most importantly, C-x/C-c vs cua-bindings (which was non-issue on OS X ⌘ but is an issue in X11 and Wayland) I never feel myself completely comfortable using emacs.
For me, kate and kdevelop are the best editors/ide.
I'm using them even on non kde desktops..
Sure, there are a few bugs and features that could be added. But it is a no match for other editors when you compare with the criterions: open source, free, lightweight to use.
* Better support for QT & KDE tooling for one.
* Faster.
* Opinion: PyCharm's static analysis seems to be better.
* Nice support for opening projects from source control.
Kdevelop is really not all that bad, and it does a good job of getting out of the way. That said, I'm using PyCharm for 99% of my work in Python. Kdevelop, I keep around for the occasion when I want to tweak a KDE app.
It used to be very crashy in the past but I recently tried it with Apache httpd codebase and it was really good - fast, accurate code completion, easy configuration, same stellar customizability except it all seems to work now.
agreed, Kdevelop which uses Kate is the only IDE I know that is able to parse properly really complex C++ code (projects that clion or visual studio or vscode would just crash on)
As someone who always used an advanced GUI texteditor (such as Notepad++ on Windows), Kate was the ideal choice for me when switching to Linux desktop.
Kate is my daily driver for +10yrs now. I could never find the time to learn vim or emacs. Kate just has everything I need, such as regexp/escape search&replace or block cursor mode editing. And for anything I cannot do in Kate, I'm using some quick scripting with inline perl or bash.
Thank's to KIOSlaves (what's the 2020 name for that?), editing files on remote hosts is just an sftp://.... away. This usually works fine on stable connections (on unstable connections, mosh+vim will give a better usage experience).
Yup. I remember Kate and Notepad++ being my two GUI choices before moving to vim at some point when my work focused more on Unix systems administration work.
When I used Kate last mounting remote files was done with fish:// and used SSH creds and sftp.
You don't have to use the Vim editor itself, but to not take advantage of Vim key bindings is a huge miss if you're doing programing work. Most modern editors have plugins that enable them. Personally I've been using Intellij with the Vim plugin.
I'm not sure what the best way to learn is, but try `vimtutor` on your shell and keep open a Vim cheat sheet like the one here: http://michael.peopleofhonoronly.com/vim/
Yeah I find that this style of cheat sheet where it's overlayed on a keyboard aren't really that useful when you know what feature you want, but don't know the key.
They make more sense for reverse-engineering, i.e. you accidently just hit a key, and you want to find out what it did.
I guess they still are useful to study in one big go, when you have some time to sit down and purely just study + practise keybindings (not working on real code) and helps with muscle memory kind of thing.
But less so when I'm being impatient and just want to figure out one thing that I need right now (while working on some real project).
I haven't used it in a while, but I remember Kate as having very good vi keybindings (maybe not over-the-top in features, but reliable and not crashing is more than even several big-name editors can claim).
KDE Neon (https://neon.kde.org/) is pretty great. It's based off the latest LTS version of Ubuntu, but is less bloated and gets KDE Frameworks updates quicker than Kubuntu.
I have been using Manjaro KDE for several months now on my daily driver, I must say I like them both.
Main issues was finding few packages with a different name than the one used on Debian based distros.
I didn't make many changes on KDE since I'm not a huge fan of customization, it's fast and has a really good look by default, same things I love of few distros shipping with GNOME such as PopOS.
I don't upgrade with every version. Usually I do it on odd numbered releases. Sometimes I'll make an exception for something I really need but typically I don't have any issues at all with that approach.
I use the KDE spin when I'm doing a fresh install. I find it to be very good. I tend to tweak my desktop a bit, I don't run with the straight defaults. The software for searching and installing packages seemed to not work well last time I checked but that was years ago- I tend to do all that with the dnf cli.
I have not moved to Wayland yet and it is not the default so that will be a big shift at some point. I also avoid nvidia. I used to use their cards but just got tired of the constant hassle.
I don't really try to push anyone towards Fedora or KDE. There are a lot of great choices when it comes to Linux but for me it's always been good. I run MacOS on my MBP for the few applications I can't run on Linux but that list has become really short. At this point I think Webex is the last thing that's holding me there. My next laptop may be a Lenovo.
I can't say my "day-to-day machine", because that is (unfortunately) windows 10 - due to my day job. However, after work, i spend nearly as many hours on my personal machine which is linux...and that machine runs Fedora 32 for the last several months (I recently switched over from 2 or so years of Linux Mint usage). When i started with Fedora 32 i started running KDE (and KDE is typically not a choice i tend to make for my DE)...Mind you, i had not run KDE for almost a decade because it used to be too heavy and slow to run for whatever old machines that i used as my personal laptops. But lately, KDE seems to be lighter...i won't go as far to say as light as, say, xfce (and to be fair i have not conducted any fair test between xfce and kde); but KDE nowadays is certainly way better than it used to be.
I've been using Plasma on NixOS, switched from GNOME 3 because I was having terrible issues with the Nvidia drivers (it may have since been fixed). It's fine although I kinda miss gedit and the GNOME terminal emulator.
I used to love Kate, during the time of KDE 3.5. Kate was amazing for simple editing of multiple documents for small projects where a full IDE was overkill.
With KDE 4, Kate became "literally unusable" for me, because it no longer re-uses a word you searched for in other editor tabs.
So you search for "size_t" in one open document and press F3 to go to the next ones. Then you open a different document and press F3, and it doesn't search for "size_t" anymore! In the KDE 3.5 version of Kate, that worked correctly. Also other things made search worse like integrating it in a tiny thing at the bottom rather than a proper dialog.
I discovered and switched to Geany then, which is similar to Kate but better in almost all aspects and more configurable.
Tangential, but I'm quite happy you put "literally unusable" in quotes and made it clear you were talking about your own use case, and not criticizing the product as a whole based on how you prefer to work. Too often do I see people make the weird assumption that how they work is how everybody works, the proceeds to trash a product based on that assumption.
> I used to love Kate, during the time of KDE 3.5.
Same here. It greatly helped my move to a Linux-only desktop.
> With KDE 4, Kate became "literally unusable" for me
It's been a long time since the release of KDE 4, but that was what did it for me too (it's been so long I don't remember the specifics). I was able to keep using the 3.x version for a while. Once that started to become an issue, I moved basically everything to Geany. I just checked and I don't even have it installed - hard to believe, given how much I used to use it.
It looks super interesting and I'm always on the lookout for a replacement for VS Code but I couldn't for the life of me open a directory like I can in vsc.
80 comments
[ 221 ms ] story [ 3938 ms ] threadI've never used Kate seriously, but I'm curious about what benefits it provides...
If it's set to "n" (for "normal mode") or "a" (for "all modes"), it pretty much does what you're mentioning: one can instantly move the cursor to a given spot; use the scroll wheel to scroll the document, and (via netrw or any other file explorer or side-bar plugin) double-click to open a different file.
If someone wanted good mouse support, I'm not sure it'd cut it. I prefer keyboard selection myself, but there are times mouse selection is faster, and I usually use not-vim for that.
In Emacs you need to configure LSP, which is a non-trivial task.
I have no idea how Kate rates in that aspect, have never used it. Suprised to hear that it's still alive (but that doesn't mean negatively surprised).
The main benefit is about choice, I keep a stack of text editors around just out of curiosity, because I like playing with software and editors and sometimes you find features you think are neat, and then go off to try and replicate them in your main editor or tool. Open source software is good at communicating ideas and text editors as a whole have really improved each other over the last three or four decades.
The reasons both Emacs and Vim have a Qt version as well instead of purely relying on a terminal protocol are obvious:
- ability to have fonts of different sizes
- ability to listen to more complicated keyboard shortcuts
- cleaner ways of opening popups
- ability to combine multiple fonts
- support for more colors
The downside of such a more complex protocol is that it's more involved to tunnel it over a network and doing attaching to X11 is also quite a bit more complicated than doing it to a terminal program.
It's just a pleasure to use.
There are some blind people who do use, and love, vim/Emacs, bit GUI editors which integrate with their OSes accessibility features are usually a better experience.
If you want an example, sometimes for errors vim prints something at the bottom, it's not clear to a screen reader if it should go read that, and why.
Im not particularly overawed with emacs or vim features. I've seen some people give breathless demos explaining how cool it was that they could do certain things and not felt especially impressed, especially given the learning curve. They seemed to be optimizing for things I don't need to optimize for.
I would use this to edit HTML, CSS, and JS (and later PHP) on my FreeBSD servers which hosted my websites.
Once I learned revision control (hg mercurial) I largely stopped modifying files directly on the remote host so I had less of a need for an sftp client built into my text editor.
Kate is lightweight yet versatile; despite what the screenshots might suggest. This is due to the extremely well-done integration in KDE: for example, the file browser is (was?) really just the file browser konqueror from KDE, Kate has to do hardly anything for that, just "wrap" it. Same for syntax highlighting, terminal, snippets, keybindings, windows chrome, and so on. Kate is really mostly a neat wrapper around a lot of existing KDE parts and libs (and that is an achievement, I don't mean that negatively).
With Vim, I often say "Unix is my IDE", with Kate that could be translated to "the Desktop Environment is your IDE".
They are all good enough for programming work and are nigh indistinguishable from each other unless you go deep.
Maybe unless it's Atom, but I think they had improved their performance over the years.
I'm just faster doing things like cutting/pasting between multiple files, splitting screens, multi-line cursors, with a GUI text editor over vim.
No, I'm not interested in putting even more time into time/effort/space-in-my-memory/etc into learning vim's keyboard combos to effectively do this stuff.
2. Syntax highlighting & formatting is better because of support for multiple fonts & better control of color.
3. Integration with other graphical apps. Kate is used as a component inside of many other KDE tools, so when you edit a file, the behavior is consistent and the key bindings are consistent.
4. Better integration with the desktop environment (in this case KDE). For example, I can open a file on a remote machine from the file open dialog. The file open dialog isis keychain aware, and can connect to any host that the desktop environment can (with KDE, that is almost anything that has file-like objects and remote protocol). You can do some editor be able to open a message from an IMAP server like I'm browsing files on localhost.
Kate is more like a Notepad++ or TextWrangler on Mac. It's a solid editor, but not an Emacs, vim, or VSCode level.
Emacs has nothing to do with shell prompts. It's a GUI editor as well. Emacs philosophy goes against Unix. I e.g. never use the terminal mode. Otherwise, your points seem on-point.
1. Selection and system clipboard integration. 2. Ability to quickly scroll to look something without moving the cursor, then return where I was by pressing an arrow key (one of the largest pain points of emacs for me). 3. Proportional fonts with proper text rendering, especially for notes.
I use 1 and 2 almost on a subconscious level, and it's hard for me to be productive in an editor which doesn't support these features. I'm sure, vim users can relate.
I already beat you to it cuz I used my mouse lol (and I don't have unwanted line numbers and garbo whitespace in the pasted text, to boot).
Selecting a block of text is arguably faster in vim than with the mouse, and then just hit "y" to copy. It think its comparable to Kate+Mouse
I'm using them even on non kde desktops..
Sure, there are a few bugs and features that could be added. But it is a no match for other editors when you compare with the criterions: open source, free, lightweight to use.
What does Kdevelop do that I won't get with Pycharm?
Kdevelop is really not all that bad, and it does a good job of getting out of the way. That said, I'm using PyCharm for 99% of my work in Python. Kdevelop, I keep around for the occasion when I want to tweak a KDE app.
Just in time to port everything to Qt 6 and start the merry-go-round again!
Kidding, but also not really.
Kate is my daily driver for +10yrs now. I could never find the time to learn vim or emacs. Kate just has everything I need, such as regexp/escape search&replace or block cursor mode editing. And for anything I cannot do in Kate, I'm using some quick scripting with inline perl or bash.
Thank's to KIOSlaves (what's the 2020 name for that?), editing files on remote hosts is just an sftp://.... away. This usually works fine on stable connections (on unstable connections, mosh+vim will give a better usage experience).
When I used Kate last mounting remote files was done with fish:// and used SSH creds and sftp.
I'm not sure what the best way to learn is, but try `vimtutor` on your shell and keep open a Vim cheat sheet like the one here: http://michael.peopleofhonoronly.com/vim/
I recommend https://danielmiessler.com/study/vim/ for those trying to learn vim
They make more sense for reverse-engineering, i.e. you accidently just hit a key, and you want to find out what it did.
I guess they still are useful to study in one big go, when you have some time to sit down and purely just study + practise keybindings (not working on real code) and helps with muscle memory kind of thing.
But less so when I'm being impatient and just want to figure out one thing that I need right now (while working on some real project).
I'll keep checking though as I do like Kate. Thanks!
Which distro?
I haven't used KDE since either openSUSE or Mandrake very long time ago.
I'm asking because if I install 20.04 now, I may want to continue using it until its EOL.
Main issues was finding few packages with a different name than the one used on Debian based distros.
I didn't make many changes on KDE since I'm not a huge fan of customization, it's fast and has a really good look by default, same things I love of few distros shipping with GNOME such as PopOS.
I have not moved to Wayland yet and it is not the default so that will be a big shift at some point. I also avoid nvidia. I used to use their cards but just got tired of the constant hassle.
I don't really try to push anyone towards Fedora or KDE. There are a lot of great choices when it comes to Linux but for me it's always been good. I run MacOS on my MBP for the few applications I can't run on Linux but that list has become really short. At this point I think Webex is the last thing that's holding me there. My next laptop may be a Lenovo.
But I've been using it for longer than that as I do recall using it for half of my university too. I recall I was using MATE before switching.
With KDE 4, Kate became "literally unusable" for me, because it no longer re-uses a word you searched for in other editor tabs.
So you search for "size_t" in one open document and press F3 to go to the next ones. Then you open a different document and press F3, and it doesn't search for "size_t" anymore! In the KDE 3.5 version of Kate, that worked correctly. Also other things made search worse like integrating it in a tiny thing at the bottom rather than a proper dialog.
I discovered and switched to Geany then, which is similar to Kate but better in almost all aspects and more configurable.
Same here. It greatly helped my move to a Linux-only desktop.
> With KDE 4, Kate became "literally unusable" for me
It's been a long time since the release of KDE 4, but that was what did it for me too (it's been so long I don't remember the specifics). I was able to keep using the 3.x version for a while. Once that started to become an issue, I moved basically everything to Geany. I just checked and I don't even have it installed - hard to believe, given how much I used to use it.
Ropes?