Big thread a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40032869

I don’t think it will dethrone Neovim for me, but this makes me wonder whether Kate could become my second editor and allow me to largely drop VS Code, especially with the DAP support. The session support also looks interesting.

I've been using Kate for quick edits but never explored its deeper features. The LSP integration and session handling look particularly useful. Good to see a thoughtful workflow built around a lightweight editor that doesn't compromise on functionality.

If you have an M3/M4 and are stuck on XNU like me, and you want a something between the notes app and a whole Electron IDE, it turns out that Kate also supporte macOS

(Actually, a lot of KDE programs do, I was elated to find out I could use Dolphin as file manager when I was limited by Finder)

I think Kate strikes this really nice middleground. It starts up immediately as just a text editor, but you can push it as far as you want to

   $ brew info kate
   ==> kate: 24.12,9168
   https://kate-editor.org/
   ...

I‘m contemplating for a while to find a replacement for VSCode. I switched to it because Atom became too slow and it had great builtin support for most stuff. But I actually was never 100% happy. I usually split my work between bigger projects and smaller file edits. And VSCode was good for the second flow. But over the years and the popularity of LSPs it kinda became dump as well. I mean the fact that if one wants to edit a python or ruby file and simply wants code formatting and a semi smart intelli sense one needs to install an lsp plus plugin etc etc. Which used to work out of the box without bigger configuration. I work on different types of projects and need a fast and quick editor from time to time. VSCode used to be that for me. But now it’s bloated as a full IDE in some cases. Will look into Kate just to see what it has to offer.

Kate editor is a hidden gem.

> I remember having two CMake extensions where both had something I needed, but they both also overlap in some basic features, so it got very confusing.

The easy strictly equivalent solution is to just one extension. Or does Kate have a single included plugin that covers everything those two extensions cover?

Wow, that's an app name I haven't heard in quite some time! Glad to hear it is still alive and kicking.

I see it has a proper multicursor support, so that's nice. There are a few plugins in vscod(e/ium) I regularly use and would miss a lot - like converting between camel/kebab/snake/sentence case, generating sequence numbers/digits, and especially calculations. I'd be surprised if these minor things are supported... Still, long time ago it was already a very capable IDE, so I'm curious where it is now. I'll give it a spin...

Kate's a pretty good editor. I've made an attempt to replace vscode/vscodium with it once before.

The article is right about vscode turning into proprietary mush. I use vscodium and have run into issues with plugins that require cpptools, while cpptools complains whenever you, or an extension you're using, accesses it in an editor other than vscode.

This is pretty much the exact same way I use Sublime (except the git diff stuff is done in Sublime Merge, which is a separate application)

I've tried switching to Kate a few times since I prefer open source tools, but it feels like a major step down UX-wise. My primary workstations have been Linux with KDE Plasma for many years, but I am not a huge fan of the KDE aesthetics (which seems to aim for maximizing clutter).

I'm generally not a picky person, but my text editor is by far my most-used tool, so it's an exception.

One feature that is impossible to live without for me is Undo Tree. Unfortunately, the only editors that support it are Vim/Neovim and Emacs. I would love to switch to one of these modern editors, but not a single one of them supports this feature.

The page doesn't say it, how well it handles very large files? Also, how does it handle editing files with various encodings? Asking this while having Notepad++ in mind.

    seq -f"foo %100.100f" 1 1000 > /tmp/test1000 && kate /tmp/test1000