Kate editor on all platforms

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Kate, KDE’s long-standing advanced text editor, is being praised for its speed, cross‑platform support, and balance between lightweight editing and pseudo‑IDE features like LSP, sessions, and integrated terminals. Commenters compare it favorably to tools such as Notepad++, VS Code, BBEdit, and classic KDE utilities, while also noting rough edges on macOS, packaging quirks, and shortcut inconsistencies. The thread highlights how Kate and related KDE technologies influenced many users’ migration to Linux and continue to shape their daily workflows across operating systems.

Overall perception and use cases

  • Many commenters describe Kate as a surprisingly powerful yet lightweight text editor.
  • Common use: quick file-based editing, scripting, and small projects rather than full-blown IDE work.
  • Some see it as “the Notepad++ of KDE” or a more capable Notepad/TextEdit equivalent.
  • Sessions feature (saving/restoring sets of open files and layout) is called out as a major usability win.

Features and strengths

  • Praised for: multi‑cursor editing, strong search/replace (including multi-file), LSP support for pseudo‑IDE workflows, integrated terminal, CSV helpers (e.g., rainbow columns), and customization.
  • Line operations (remove empty/duplicate lines, duplicate lines) now exist and are discoverable via “Find Action”.
  • Syntax highlighting is considered excellent and easy to adapt to unusual languages/ISAs.
  • Performance: repeatedly described as very fast and snappy, with low latency; one dev briefly explains an efficient block-based text buffer design.

Cross‑platform availability

  • Widely appreciated that a historically KDE/Linux editor now runs on Windows, macOS, and BSD.
  • Windows builds are said to be fairly polished.
  • macOS builds: mixed experiences. Some praise recent stability; others report shortcut/keybinding mismatches, build complexity, and rough edges.
  • On OpenBSD, dependency set pulls in PulseAudio and speech packages due to text‑to‑speech, which some find heavy.

Comparisons to other tools

  • Positioned between simple editors (Notepad, TextEdit) and full IDEs (VSCode, JetBrains).
  • Favored by some over VSCode/BBEdit for being lighter and free of “surveillance/corporate” integrations.
  • Others still prefer Vim/Emacs or IDEs for advanced workflows, but keep Kate as a secondary editor.

KDE ecosystem context

  • Kate’s editor component is reused across KWrite, KDevelop, Kile, etc., tying into long‑standing KDE technologies like KParts.
  • Several nostalgic digressions: KDE 3.5, Konqueror, Amarok, k3b, and the evolution of KDE’s philosophy around configurability.

Criticisms and rough edges

  • macOS keybindings and shortcuts seen as non‑native and frustrating by some.
  • UX complaints: default start page, restoring many files, and Kate’s icon/theme choices.
  • Some dislike perceived visual convergence toward VSCode’s design.
  • SQL plugin is mentioned as under‑maintained; help is invited.