Kate allows you to specify local document variables by setting the corresponding modelines. The hidden file .kateconfig provides exactly the same functionality, but for all files in the directory.

Enable the Feature

To use a .kateconfig file you first have to enable the feature by invoking Settings > Configure Kate. In the config page Open/Save you can find the option Search depth for config file, which defaults to Do not use a config file. Change the value to an appropriate number,

• 0 means look in the current folder
• 1 means look in the current folder, and if there is no .kateconfig file, look in the parent folder
• etc…

In short – Kate will search the number of given folder levels upwards for a .kateconfig file and load the settings from it.

Fill the .kateconfig File

The .kateconfig file simply contains modelines.

The following example will cause all documents to indent with 4 spaces with a tab width of 4. Tabs will be replaced during editing text and the end-of-line symbol is a linefeed (\n).

kate: space-indent on; tab-width 4; indent-width 4; replace-tabs on; eol unix;

Final Note

Right now it is not possible to specify different settings for different filetypes/mimetypes. We are aware of this problem and hope to provide a fix in near future, perhaps for KDE 4.