This is sort of a poll: Please write in the comments below exactly
- one line about what you like on Kate, and
- one line what you want improved.
Please spread the word so we get a lot of feedback – Thanks! 🙂
This is sort of a poll: Please write in the comments below exactly
Please spread the word so we get a lot of feedback – Thanks! 🙂
when using files with line length >1000 chars or more than 300000 rows (csv) it is slaggy.
do you mean block selection mode (ctrl+shift+b)?
Streaming from disk for big files
Why not using the KDE Forums, which also have a poll feature? 😉
the comment ate my angle brackets, needed in C++ for templates.
Seconding both. Angle brackets would also be great for HTML…
https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=CONFIRMED&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&product=kate
So much 🙂
Many thanks to all contributors of kate and kde 🙂
https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=CONFIRMED&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&product=kate
Lua comment highlighting being broken as soon as the character ‘ is used in them.
About that Lua comment: please fill the bugreport, or visit IRC, it’s easy to fix the highlight file yourself with few hints.
Change this in the settings; the keys are for “I want it changed for this view only”. The checkboxes in the settings are permanent.
@Rsh
Configure Kate=>Editor Component=>Appearance=>Dynamic Wordwrap=>Check
Configure Kate=>Editor Component=>Editing=>Enable statci wordwrap=>Uncheck
No, that’s not the problem.
For really long lines, kate force-wraps them.
As above, I had to use a different editor to work with these files.
Yes, the lines were really long, not sure whether the limit was 1000 or 4k, something like that.
Yeah, that is rather annoying. Weird thing is it seems to support longer lines, because when you manually correct it, it works fine. At least that is what I have experienced.
Small, fast and clever.
There are a lot of Syntax highlight definitions, but some of them is missing such as
This would not be problem but the documentation of how to write syntax definition files incomprehensible without clear examples.
Someone who knows nothing about the structure of the syntax definition xml can not write a simple one (see above) based on this documentation.
http://kate-editor.org/2005/03/24/writing-a-syntax-highlighting-file/
So very very pain full to learn the syntax highlight definition.
The .kateconfig file is useless, because it is applied to all of the files in the directory. What if there are two or more different kind of file in the same directory?
Lack of http://editorconfig.org/ support.
Undocumented “Project” feature. Partially implemented UI.
http://kate-editor.org/2012/11/02/using-the-projects-plugin-in-kate/
The “F1” key and the “Help” button is context insensitive. It is always leads to the home page of the documentation. (Which is outdated)
The UI of the “Font & color schemas” editor is a UX fail.
Unclear property inheritance. There is no preview at all. There is no customizable text (source code) to preview per language.
Very few documentation for snippets especially for scripts in the snippet package.
With this problems (and several more) the KATE is the one of the best editor.
Thank you
Yeah, two “improve” items sorry 🙂
(1) I often have a lot of files open. I’d like to be able to “pin” some files (sort of “favorite” for my current editing session) so that I can very quickly switch to theses files. I know about the quick open dialog (ctrl-alt-o) and the color code in the filelist side panel but it’s not exactly the same need. Maybe these pinned files could have their own “favorite filelist” side panel, or a tabbar.
Oliver, relative numbering was recently added.
Vim plugins – we are little bit far from that
remaping the keys – you can create mappings of your own, the problem is with the original mappins that can’t be remapped I think right now (but we are slowly getting there)
Relative numbering will be there for the next release 😉 : https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/115443/
Right now on my interface. There is a “Current Project” in my status bar that does nothing. “Projects” in sidebar also does nothing. And in the menu “Projects” there is only “Right” and “Left” which also does nothing.
http://kate-editor.org/2012/11/02/using-the-projects-plugin-in-kate/
Some functionality that can’t be used trough the user interface and requires the manual creation of json files to work, shouldn’t be enabled by default.
Option to keep the same search string across buffers would be very welcome here
alt+left/right arrow
– pros: Kate is very nice and already has most of the features requested above (for instance, one can switch off line wrapping).
– cons: It could be easier to use with projects and git (especially without writing your own .project file).
Cynic: Please make a file called “.kateproject” and only that, no name before the . in the top level directory of your project. It will be a hidden file in Unix.
Here are the contents of one of ours (hopefully it won’t crap out in the blog)
{ "name": "Awk", "files": [ { "directory": ".", "filters": ["*.c", "*.h", "*.y", "makefile", "awk.1", "README", "FIXES"], "recursive": 0 }], "build": { "directory": ".", "build": "make", "clean": "make clean", "install": "make install" } }Like: EVERYTHING. Seriously there’s just far too much good stuff.
Improve: I’d like to see use of a scanner so kate stores and handles tokens, and we don’t have the same routines being run over and over, eg there was a change not so long ago that added lexing for C++ i think, and all the info was just thrown away after use. This would also make highlighters and indent scripts run a lot faster, and more accurately for syntax.
Apart from that, I’d like to see a period of consolidation: the projects plugin showed how good integration can be, and I think there’s a lot of scripting possibilities from that. So in line with the recent improvements to Build Plugin, I’d like to see kate really get polished for KF5 (since my other suggestion is never going to happen in time;)
(wrt above, just use standard double quote, and it’ll be fine, cynic. you may have to quit the session and restart kate if you make changes; the refresh button doesn’t seem to work in my distro version. i’m upgrading now..)
• Like: Highlighting of identical names when clicking a variable
• Improve: Files in Document-View should have a more verbose context menu (when right-clicking with the mouse) containing at least “rename” and “open file manager in directory containing this file”
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=313455
highsciguy: enhance how?:)
improve: 2 things come to mind:
is kate-part also ok (Kwrite user here)?
Loving Everything.
Wishing the Projects Plugin would expose functionality to ease repository tasks, eg:
Add file to current project when saving.
Revert a file to a previous point
Revert a project
Get Status of Files vs upstream
Diff file vs another version
Add Tags/comments
Commit / Push / Check-in
Check-out, Switch Branch
Etc.
Of course I mentioned Git in the above but these should probably be VC system agnostic.
I’d like smarter defaults for the location of new files – currently they go to my Documents directory instead of the sub-directory of the project I’m working on… Or generally, some intelligent defaults for detecting and handling “projects” and guessing which open files belong together based on a common root path.
I like Kate because it has the right amount of balance as a fast and light-weight option between a (too) simple text editor and a massive full-blown IDE.
Like: Powerful formatting options.
Improve: Paste text at the text-cursor position rather than the mouse cursor position.
Like everything about it! The auto completion support would be complemented by using clang; the existing auto completers are very slow. I do use KDevelop most of the time, but kate is nide for those little edits
Like: everything
Just 2 wish: please add cursor history I.e jump back and forth between previous cursor positions and do not remove multi window
+ Ctrl+Alt+o for quick search! & Well Kate rocks all round.
– Better and easier to use project support
– Good puppet highlighting by default
Like: VI mode, Pate plugin, overall modularity
Improve:
o VI mode (split window and navigate between them)
o Pate plugin (python API) , plugins repository
Wish:
o Command Palette to quickly access Kate functionality (Sublime Text, Emacs M-x)
o Terminal buffer (like emacs ansi-term)
o Webkit browser plugin to preview markdown document or browse documentation on the web
Like: All the little shortcuts that make life easier, eg shft+alt+down
Improve: Html highlighting with php and foldable html tags
Request: ability to save all open files, eg of a session/project, into a folder with their original directory structure, eg save_folder/a/one.php and save_folder/b/two.php
* Very nice, simple and powerful
* Add Ctrl+click to open css file in tag on HTML code
* Improve tab manager: add a menu when multiple files are open (like the last release of KDevelop)
I need to use SciTE instead of Kate for only one purpose: to open up files that have their line feeds stripped out and are one long line. This happens a lot in web development when .css or .js files are “minimized” to save precious bytes.
Kate can open them, but complains. Kate is also VERY SLOW at scrolling such a file when “word wrap” is turned on. Agonizingly slow. And thus I need to use Gedit or SciTE.
Is there any way that Kate can have arbitrarily long lines?
– like: internal terminal, split views, search in folder
– improve: Multi-line edit like in VIM and Sublime, more and better color schemas
+ light, fast
– can’t edit very long lines
– slow with large files
– search & replace ui is absolutely horrible
Like: Vi mode
Want: Sublime style multi-cursor
Like: F4 to show a terminal
Want: F4 to hide the terminal again, just like in Dolphin
Cool: The syntax-highlighting 🙂
To be improved: It should remember spell-checking, line-break etc. settings, per session (not just kate, also all the programs using KatePart – it’s seriously annoying to have to set up all of this again each time I start Kile)
Like: navigating in folder tree structure
Improve: drag and drop function like in Quanta (all files should be dropped into html as relative links, except images that are dropped like img tags)
Like: Mini-map scrolling
Improve: Bracket block minimizing (the highlighting will work great, but it’ll roll up the whole rest of the document or at least a lot of extra stuff)
Like: the new column edit – been asking for and wanting it for years
Improve: smart brackets 1) mark some text, press opening bracket/parenthesis/quotes, have automatic closing of same character. 2) do NOT overwrite closing bracket/parenthesis/quotes when typing one next to it.
Like: support for lots of programming languages
Improve: File Tree Browser creates new file/directory only in the displayed root directory!
here: http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/Kate+Include+Helper+Plugin?content=148606
Likes: its very powerful, yet lightweight
Improve: integrated lint, ala eclipse
Like: If I had to pick one feature, tree view file list
Improve: Fixed autobrackets https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=313455
Like: just about everything
Improve: Fix bug 64754. It’s over 11 years old! (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64754)
Improve: Better management of toolbars (katepartview???)
like:
Kile
the over all usability
improve:
a biblatex syntax highlighting
the multiple file management is a bit awkward
like: lots: multi-document, multi-window
improve: meld functionality for comparing views (not just on saved files, but also unsaved documents)
LIKE: Lots of stuff
IMPROVE: WYSIWYG Project Management
Love: the documents tree.
Wish: I wish the plugin API was both more powerful and better documented. The other day I wanted to write a plugin that lets me click (or ctrl-click or something) on code and have it send me to the docs for that function. It seems like the plugin support is almost only for what has already been thought of, or for new widgets.
What’s cool : Kate + VI mode = the best of both worlds.
What’s should be improved : better default color schemes.
Thank for your great work ! I use Kate everyday and it’s a such a powerfull editor. There is too much low-quality/useless applications shipped with KDE vanilla, but Kate is really a killer app.
If i could have a second chance, I would say
What should be improved: better automatic code folding (now the only option is to fold top level nodes, no way to fold everything) and option to save all opened files to a folder but into subfolders keeping the structure of the directories they originally lay into.
like: very good support for regexps. Before kate I have used perl onliners for search replace a lot. With kate is is much more convenient to do it.
impovements: please have very close look to textmate on Mac. This is the only comparable editor to kate. So it would not hurt to get some inspiration and copy some little small improvements which kate is still missing. To get some idea, look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmhp1-nHd9c but certaily there is more.
* Like: I love how it exhibts the filesystem tree when you have files under different paths.
* Improve: let users specify line height (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=328837)
1. it is really multi-functional and universal tool
2. ability open files which paths given (written) in opened document (for example the “include” files or other text files)
Likes:
* It’s really fast, yet has most of the features I want from an advanced text editor such as split view, good syntax highlighting, block selection, search in files, session management, and “highlight selection” extension. In fact, Kate & Dolphin were the major reason why I moved from GNOME to KDE, after seeing how fast & featured Kate & Dolphin were, even on GNOME!
Wishlist:
* Allow to go back & forward in view history. eg: You press PageDown a few times then switch to a different tab. Hitting “Back” should go back to that place in the original tab and then “Back” several times again should take you back to the original location. Currently, Alt+Left/Right goes through your recent tab history but not your recent location history.
* The “Search in Files” feature is extremely useful (particularly for programmers), but it is a hassle to open & close the panel. It should be easy to open it (eg: with a shortcut) and close it (eg: with a shortcut and with a Close button). Currently you have to click on “Edit -> Search in Files” to open it, and “View -> Tool Views -> Show Search and Replace” to close it, so this is hard to find and becomes annoying if you want to do it often. Also, it would be great if the “Search in Files” results was shown either as a single list or if the current tree view had all items open, so you can easily just scroll down to see all results in all files at once, instead of clicking to view results from one file at a time.
* Allow manually shuffling around the tabs, such as if you want a few tabs to always be at the start of the list or grouped together compared to other tabs. I currently have to close all files and re-open them in a certain order to get this! (I’m using “Multiline Tab Bar”). Even adding “Move tab higher / lower” to the context menu of the tab-bar would allow this.
+1 for your wishlist
I like the clear and logical way of handling syntax highlighting colors.
PHP Xdebug support as a plugin would be great.
I pretty much love everything about Kate.
Except the difficulty of getting it to work on OS X.
Like:
So much… but one of my favorite features is that remote file handling works same as local. No separate widgets for FTP, SFTP, etc… one unified whole. Why does no other editor have that?
Dislike:
Only that my favorite KDE feature ever has disappeared once again. Used to be that with automatic brace/parens/quote matching (not the extension but the built-in feature that is now gone) you could do all sorts of cool things such as highlight a string, hit the left parens ‘(‘ and automatically the text would be wrapped with a right parens. It also worked for braces, brackets, single and double quotes. Quite simply the best timesaver I have seen in a text editor, and now… GONE.
Fortunately, the claim of many has returned that unique feature. You only have to compile bracesane extension from https://bugs.kde.org/attachment.cgi?id=77378 (cmake; make & make install; then kbuildsycoca4) and it’s back online. I strongly hope will be included in future releases as before.
My favorite feature of Kate is its syntax highlighting. It has the most beautiful syntax highlighting I have ever used in any text editor. Kate is also feature-rich, with several useful plugins, and it is under constant development. These are some of my favorite features of this remarkable text editor.
As for shortcomings, the following are what I can think of. Although Kate supports many programming languages, some are absent, a prominent example being the lack of Squirrel support. Another shortcoming is its lack of documentation concerning some of its plugins, which prevents me from understanding how to use them.
I have some other gripes with Kate, but that is largely because I tend to view Kate as a replacement to other Integrated Development Environments, and, as such, I suppose it is not proper to list them as shortcomings. Moreover, Kate is already becoming better and better with each version, and I would like to thank the hard-working developers who labor on each new release.
Overall, Kate, as I have said, is remarkable. Therefore, it is right now the principal tool I use for my development projects. I look forward to the new features Kate has to offer to make a developer’s life even easier.
Thanks for your effort! I appreciate it. 🙂
I really like to see reStructuredText text highlighting for code blocks:
.. code:: python
print(“A literal block directive explicitly marked as python code”)
Thanx! 🙂 (BTW vim support it!)
Like: Customizable highlighting, uncluttered design.
Dislike: Alt-Left and Alt-Right going by position in the document list (useless) and not by opened document history for the specific window (very useful). Ordered by “last time document changed in this window”.
A few people have mentioned wanting a syntax higlighting file, or a “missing language”.
If you want it added, /join #kate on IRC: chat.freenode.net and I for one will help you write the highlighter file; 9 times out of 10 they’re very easy, but it does require someone who uses the language to drive the effort, and add new keywords etc over time.
There’s a couple of others in there who regularly work on higlighters too; everyone in the channel is very supportive, so get involved. 🙂
Thanx for good idea! 🙂 But ReST and markdown are a little more complicated than just add new keywords. It could be probably good idea to make python plugin for it ..
I love working with Kate, but https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=83301 should finally be addressed – it’s been open for over 10 years now, and it’s probably no biggie to implement. Writing LaTeX or other text documents with lines as wide as your screen doesn’t exactly make text more readable. It should be possible to have lines break dynamically at e.g. the position for hard line breaks.
Another thing that should be addressed is making it possible for regular expressions to be non-greedy, e.g. \w+? is an errorneous expression according to Kate.
Here’s a screenshot of what I mean. It’s awkward that even though dynamic line breaks are enabled, lines only break at the edge of the window when working with text documents.
http://i.imgur.com/YG5scLV.png
*) LIKE : its lighweight 😀
*) IMPROVE : i wish there’s plugin that enable to chat with friends (gtalk,jabber,facebook, etc.)
sorry for my bad english 🙂
* Like: Split view, the documents sidebar, and Ctrl-D to comment code
* Improve: folder display in documents sidebar. If I’m editing files in A/src/ and B/src/, it’s not helpful to see two top-level folders called src/, because I can’t tell which is which (frequently, I have ~10 folders named “src/” listed in the sidebar at once). Include the A and B to make the pathnames unique.
as a workaround you could (create and) open file at A and B folders. (for example create todo or readme)
I like to have shortcut to find file name in doc sidebar (I have open pretty much of them)
It’s a good trick, and I already use it :).
* Like: Easy to learn but powerful
* Improve: Restoration of External Tools plugin
* Improve: Richer JavaScript API. For example, a function like system() in VIM, which gets the output of the shell command, in place of External Tools plugin.
♥ Like: Everything 🙂
✔ Should be improved: File System Browser plugin that currently slows down the start up of kate; when I disable this plugin it starts as it should (fast).
LIKE: syntax highlighting is fantastic. i use a lot of custom words and colours–makes it very easy to understand code at a glance. the folder/file display is something one can not give up after using.
DISLIKE: code folding was great, then revised and ruined for me. can not fold at a specific level now–it boggles my mind that programmer would think it’s OK to just drop a feature like that. terrible for coding classes and almost a deal-breaker. at the very least, if it remembered “manual” folds in the session, but that seem not to work either.
LIKE: simplistic power ..and vi-mode
IMPROVE: better vi-mode.. i.e. use neovim’s embedded mode to get full-featured vim features (https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/1060)
LIKE: All the animated gizmos that help to find matching elements in the code. Code map (especially with code change indicators). Overall looks and feel of the editing area.
DISLIKE: simplified code folding options – I really enjoyed working with Kate, and after code folding ‘update’ I’m not using it at all (reverted to Wine/Notepad++ instead).
IMPROVE: persistent folding states. Folding state data could be stored locally, and contain file path and a file checksum – if both matches the actual file (tested on opening the file), folding states should be restored. It could work independently from sessions. I suppose sessions already should allow that, but it never worked for me. Maybe I didn’t try hard enough, maybe it simply doesn’t work for remote files, or it doesn’t work at all.
SUGGESTION: Add a syntax highlighting scheme that mimics old black and green (or black/amber) displays. Red/bright colors for highlights and errors, shades of green (maybe some other non-conflicting colors) for normal code. That would be really cool.
like : everything
improve : PHP Xdebug support as a plugin would be great.
like: large array of options and features
improves: autosave!
Like: the gigantic feature list
Improve: More text editor features, like mark a specific line with a specific color (which i see on printing)
Like: Spellcheck, brackets highlighting.
Want: A “Brackets check” function that parses the whole document (for text docs rather than programs) and highlights ALL bracket-pair contents. This would help locate missing closing brackets – a common error in my text documents!.
Cool: Reliable; super fast and easy to customize; clean, easy on the eyes IDE; logical menus; features available but not in your face; tools, highlighting, code folding, sessions, command line — Kate can be customized for how you work best, not how someone else thinks you should work.
Improved: API documentation and broken features; documentation is getting harder to find; most online links are broken.
Drop the tabs. Drop double-click to switch document in the “Documents” list. Make it not take 4 seconds to open/close a document. Kate used to be my favourite editor, it still is, but it hurts me that it is so slow and becoming more clumsy to use.
LIKE: code map, code completation, customizable *
DISLIKE: map still shows whole code when there is 1500+ lines, it becomes impossible to get where I want via map
Please include a duplicate lines finder / remover. Thanks. Othewise I love it.
* Custom highlighting
* Absence of custom indenter (can be as simple as … indentamount=”-1″… in detectors
Like: Everything – awesome all round editor
Improve / feature request: Highlighting for repeat text in the scroll bar (like chrome does). This will allow you to see all the repeat occurrences of the highlighted text in a single glance. The Minimap is pretty cool, but it’s too bulky!!
Like: Snippets.
Improve: Don’t bury them in a hierarchy of menus! (I miss the paste applet really, but quick access to snippets would be almost as good.)
On kate 5.0 Fish protocol is broken, fix it and it will be perfect !
When I have multiple instances of Kate open I’d like to be able to drag and drop tabs between the two instances.
Another item: We should be able to set a default “open” folder in preferences. As it is, its stuck on “> Home > Documents” and there is no way to change it. It should be customizable in preferences (This has bugged me forever)
like– block edit
improve– user defined keywords and code folding
the code folding is still atrocious. will this ever be fixed? i will gladly pay for it.
Sadly, despite removing important level-based folding options (they are commented-out in code, and completely removed from menubar source), Kate still has annoying bugs, like folding code at random nodes in a way that makes it impossible to fold anything below that point (you need to manually find and unfold offending node to get that fixed).
Another one I just came across (and another show stopper for me) makes code map useless. I’m talking about those color dots indicating code changes on document map. Brilliant idea for quick code scrolling, but when code is folded, they are shown in wrong places.
It feels almost like someone is sabotaging this project.
Anyway, NP++ works fine under Wine, you only need to remove titlebar from tooltip windows, so the autocomplete and function hints won’t obscure your code as you write.
Like: split views, column edit
Need: better code folding and customization: add code folding for multiline comments, make easy for user to add keywords to existing keyword group, add new keyword group, create-your-own language template for highlighting, code folding, comment styles, etc.
like: mostly everything, my editor of choice for a long time
need/improve: multi-line tab bar extension in plasma 5 is missing ?
Like: Automatic highlighting of the same word in a document.
Improvement: The option to strip out trailing whitespace in unsaved documents was removed. My workflow depends on a lot of copy and paste from the terminal to internal ticket notes. Trailing whitespace has been known to creep in, especially when using Konsole. There is no reason to save the document locally at all, so relying on stripping it out when saving the document adds an otherwise-unneeded step to my workflow. Please see about adding this feature back in.
Request: JSHint
The applied word wrap cannot be unwrapped. Static wrap is selected
in the Configuration.
Kate Version 3.13.3
KDE Development Platform 4.13.3
Xubuntu 14.04 32bit