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Kate is packed with features that will make it easier for you to view and edit all your text files. Kate lets you to edit and view many files at the same time, both in tabs and split views, and comes with a wide variety of plugins, including an embedded terminal that lets you launch console commands directly from Kate, powerful search and replace plugins, and a preview plugin that can show you what your MD, HTML and even SVG will look like.
Kate supports highlighting for over 300 languages making it easier to read code in almost all programming languages. Kate also understands how brackets works and will help you navigate inside complex code blocks hierarchies. On-the-fly spellchecking is also included and will help you check your text before publishing.
Boost your productivity with a help of multi-cursor and multi-selection features. Kate now has it! Switching from other proprietary text editors and missing your hotkey bindings you used to? You can configure every hotkey in Kate so you don't even have to retrain yourself
Work on multiple files at the same time with split views. Use the project sidebar to navigate your project directory structures and use Kate's smart tabs to quickly access your recently opened documents. The powerful search and replace tool lets you quickly search inside your entire projects.
Kate is the perfect tool for programming as it includes autocompletion for many languages with the help of the Language Server Protocol (LSP). The editor has been optimized for editing code and provide scriptable auto indentation, VI input mode, rectangular block selection mode, smart comment and uncomment handling and much more.
Kate contains many plugins installed by defaults, making it more powerful than any other text editor. Use the integrated terminal emulator to run commands directly from Kate, execute SQL queries with the SQL extension, use GDB to debug your program, build projects with just one click, and much, much more.
With the Qt 6.7 release, Qt introduced a wide range of improvement for the text rendering and font shaping.
One element of this is that you can now configure OpenType font features.
Many of the 'new cool' programming fonts have such features integrated. That includes both free fonts like Cascadia Code or paid fonts like MonoLisa.
Let's use the features of Cascadia Code as an example, that is the stuff they promote on their GitHub page:
Read MoreG2 posted some fun logos for Kate on reddit.
I think they are nice and flashy and well suited if you want to show your appreciation for Kate and like that art style and a good addition to our awesome icon and mascot.
G2 licensed these files under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Feel free to share the stuff with this license and credit for G2.
Read MoreSo this is not quite an introduction since the plugin has been around for almost a year now, having been released in the 23.04 release but since I never got around to writing a blog about it, here I am.
In simple words, the formatting plugin allows one to format code easily and quickly. Well the "quickness" depends on the underlying code formatter but we try to be as quick as possible. So far if you wanted to do code formatting from within Kate, the only way to do that was to configure a tool in the External Tools plugin and then invoke it whenever you wanted to format the code. While this works it wasn't great for a few reasons. Firstly, you would loose undo history. Secondly, the buffer would jump and you would most likely loose your current position in the document. Thirdly, for every language you get a different tool and you need to remember the right tool to invoke on the right document type.
Read MoreThanks to the help of our contributors the current state of Kate for the upcoming first Qt & KF 6 release looks very promising. This includes not just people working on Kate and KTextEditor/KSyntaxHighlighing, but all of KDE Frameworks and Qt.
I now use the KF 6 based version both at work and home exclusively after we switched the master branch over to that. So far, beside the natural issues that can occur using a branch under active development, nothing really did stick out as a blocking issue.
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