Kate
The Kate project develops two main products: KatePart, the advanced editor component which is used in numerous KDE applications requiring a text editing component, and Kate, a MDI text editor application.
Cost / License
- Free
- Open Source
Application types
Germany
EUPlatforms
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- BSD
- KDE Plasma
- Flathub
- Flatpak
- Snapcraft
Features
Properties
- Lightweight
Features
- Native application
- Themes
- Syntax Highlighting
- Editable text color schemes
- Built-in terminal emulation
- Tabbed interface
- Extensible by Plugins/Extensions
- Code Formatting
- Support for regular expressions
Git Support- Full-Text Search
- Support for MarkDown
- Spell Checking
- Built-in themes
Tags
- programmers-editor
Kate News & Activities
Recent News
- POX published news article about KDE Plasma
KDE Gear 25.12 brings enhancements to Itinerary, Dolphin, Kate, Photos and other KDE appsKDE Gear 25.12 is now available, introducing a series of new features and improvements across the K...
- Maoholguin published news article about KDE Plasma
KDE Gear 24.08 released: major enhancements across Dolphin, Konsole, Kdenlive, and moreThe KDE Project has announced the release of KDE Gear 24.08, the latest stable version of its open-...
Recent activities
- EmilE1337 liked Kate
OrdinaryPerson added Kate as alternative to Visual Code Space
Ugotsta added Kate as alternative to Fresh editor- goodemerald liked Kate
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What is Kate?
The Kate project develops two main products: KatePart, the advanced editor component which is used in numerous KDE applications requiring a text editing component, and Kate, a MDI text editor application. In addition, we provide KWrite, a simple SDI editor shell which allows the user to select his/her favourite editor component.
Kate
Kate is a multi-document editor part of KDE since release 2.2. Being a KDE application, Kate ships with network transparency, as well as integration with the outstanding features of KDE. Choose it for viewing HTML sources from konqueror, editing configuration files, writing new applications or any other text editing task. You still need just one running instance of Kate.
With a multi-view editor like Kate you get a lot of advantages. You can view several instances of the same document and all instances are synchronized. Or you can view more files at the same time for easy reference or simultaneous editing.
KWrite
KWrite is a simple text editor application, allowing you to edit one file at the time per window. As Kate, KWrite uses the editor component KatePart.KWrite simply provides the selected editor component with a window frame, and lets you open and save documents. KWrite shares all features the KatePart provides, look here to get an overview. Licensing
Kate is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) Version 2 Kate is part of the KDE project. How to get the entire source code is described in the article Get It.
Comments and Reviews
Probably the best Text Editor/IDE for Linux. I've already tried Geany (good features, but not customizable the way I want), Gedit (too simple, and interface is not what I need) and LeafPad (lightweight, but too simple for coding). Kate is just perfect, can build and compile right within it with a simple shortcut, can disable file tabs and a lot more.
The features are extraordinary and abundant, but an unfortunately crowded, redundant, and counterintuitive interface detracts from them. I had surprisingly little luck with the Find Action tool under the Help menu and repeatedly found myself scouring forums or youtube tutorials for each and every feature on a need basis.
I kept faith for months until today I finally had the misfortune of learning Kate lacks automatic backup for unsaved files or sessions, a feature I consider standard for any modern text editor.
This is your NotePad++ on Linux, go for it.
Great performance - not as fully featured as e.g. VS Code, but still quite powerful.
very nice and easy text editor with hightlithing
Many editors try to stuff as many functions in as they can. But they don’t care of giving things structure. And so end up with a mess. (Example: Notepad++) Also, they just copy and imitate each other.
Kate is still very clean and easy to get started with. With nice innovations like the scroll bar that also is a big-picture overview of the whole document, and “block mode” where you edit the same columns of many lines all at once. And it is very powerful, without becoming its own operating system (like Emacs and VI and everything build on “web technologies”). It still does one thing: Be an editor. And does it right. With all the bells and whistles that a power user expects. Plus, if you want more, you can use any other application that uses the same KPart (e.g. KDevelop). Or add some plug-ins.
The only thing I would like to see added, is selecting a word, and pressing a key combo, to edit all occurrences of that word in the document at once.
And maybe try to be less “smart” (read: treating me like I’m stupid) with the default settings. (E.g. trying to indent my Haskell code wrongly whenever I edit certain lines, because it doesn’t get the more advanced code style I use.) But all that “smartness” can be configured differently with one click in the settings, so it’s really just a detail. Plus, all editors think they have to do this nowadays.
[Edited by Evi1M4chine, April 23]_
I tried to install Kate on a Mac. Well, it is possible, but you need quite a bit of knowledge of command lines, patience, perseverance and about 4 GB of disk space. Yes, because you need Xcode developer tooks, Fink and KDE... Kate is cool, but lacks macros. Just go for jEdit that is available for Win, Mac, Linux and also on a multiplatform Java installer.