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 (GPL-2.0)
Application types
Germany
EUPlatforms
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- BSD
- KDE Plasma
- Flathub
- Flatpak
- Snapcraft
Features
Properties
- Lightweight
- Support for Themes
Features
- Native application
- Themes
- Syntax Highlighting
- Editable text color schemes
- Tabbed interface
- Built-in terminal emulation
- Extensible by Plugins/Extensions
- Support for regular expressions
- Code Formatting
- Full-Text Search
Git Support- Ad-free
- Built-in themes
- No registration required
- Support for MarkDown
- No Tracking
- Spell Checking
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
BLumia added Kate as alternative to Pineapple Notepad- TBayAreaPat replied to a comment / review on Kate
- TBayAreaPat reviewed Kate
A great text editor in the quest to find a replacement for NotePad++. The only editor I've found that will let me open a folder list in side panel, AND rename files in that panel.. even NotePad++ won't do that.. even with plug-ins. Editing is extra convenient from Kate's context menu. There's a symbol on the left corner of the file tabs to indicate if a file has been saved, and a color bar to the left of new un/saved text lines. On mostly an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) level,...
- lgwhitlock added Support for Themes as a feature to Kate
- lgwhitlock liked Kate
- jcryig 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.
A great text editor in the quest to find a replacement for NotePad++. The only editor I've found that will let me open a folder list in side panel, AND rename files in that panel.. even NotePad++ won't do that.. even with plug-ins. Editing is extra convenient from Kate's context menu. There's a symbol on the left corner of the file tabs to indicate if a file has been saved, and a color bar to the left of new un/saved text lines. On mostly an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) level, here's some things that Kate does natively that NPP does not: 1. First‑party Markdown/HTML/SVG preview 2. Native Language Server Protocol client 3. Integrated Git toolview 4. Embedded terminal emulator 5.Built‑in debugger
I could be using an IDE like IntelliJ IDEA instead of this non-IDE for Java, but I do not need one. This also has support for every single language I could think of, however!
Did I mention it is FOSS? And bundled into KDE Plasma?
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