I’m not an IT professional or even expert. I’ve been using Geany for a decade, but recently I switched from a frugal setup to KDE Plasma, and decided that I want to use everything KDE has to offer as far as possible.
I’ve been using Kate for almost 3 months now, mostly for web development (Jinja), shell scripting and Markdown writing. It’s been a good experience overall, but it seems to have one or two shortcomings compared to Geany, which makes me wonder how Kate fares in the landscape of Linux code editors/IDEs.
To give a concrete example, Geany has this great feature for HTML that automatically creates a closing tag once I finish the opening one. E.g. I type <div>, and as soon as I type the , a closing </div> appears. Neat. That’s more than just automatically closing brackets. I see no Kate plugin that would do that.
There’ve been a few more niggles, I’ll edit the post - which I hope makes sense as a general question - when I remember them.
edit: Thanks for putting it all into perspective. Takeaways for me: 1) there’s also kdevelop, 2) need to figure out what LSP is, and 3) regarding alternatives it’s interesting to see which Archlinux has in its repositories and which are only AUR.
It’s an upscale text editor, not an IDE. Plenty of options if you want fancy IDE features.
The best code editor to use is that one that works for you.
I knew a guy who I swear did half his work in notepad, but it worked for him.
My first stint as a sysadmin I did it all with nano.
8 years as the Linux SME for a Fortune 500, 8 years of being griefed for using nano.
I only started using vi when I moved into a world without nano.
Now I use vscode with vim keybinds.
I was probably just as efficient on nano and vi as I am now in vscode, the tools you have need to work for you.
Interesting. I use Kate for the same type of projects.
Except that web development is something I hardly do, so I just need something simple.
Similarly, for the occasional Python script or some other language that I rarely use, I go with Kate.For markdown, I prefer KWrite.
I mainly do C and C++ and for those I have KDevelop and Qt Creator.
For Rust, it would be KDevelop. I haven’t looked into whether Qt Creator has any special Rust support.I still have to understand how Kwrite, Kate and Kdevelop relate to each other. It seems they’re all built around the same base, with increasing feature-richness.
Yeah. They all use the same text editor library.
KWrite has a very small amount of features (which is still way more than Notepad though). It still has syntax highlighting and stuff. I would recommend it if you are editing stuff like grub/sshd configuration files or reading log files.
Kate has a “Sessions” thingy, unless you are on Debian 12 or older. So when you want to open a directory as a project and save some metadata of your session, this is a good idea. Also, proper LSPs and stuff.KDevelop is fully meant for programming, using build systems and such. It does require a fair bit of configuration on the first time though. So if you have a CMakeLists.txt in your project, you can use this thing to make your work easier. It works with other build systems too, I just didn’t try them out.
I switched to KDE Plasma a couple years ago and still use Geany, mostly because I find it easier to set up to my liking.
I think Kate has most of what I need, though. It’s just more painful than Geany to replace its defaults with settings that suit me, so I haven’t bothered.
If I ever find myself regularly programming in a language that Geany doesn’t support, I might switch over to Kate for its language server protocol support. For now, I don’t need it.
For a “lean back” editor (as opposed to “lean in” like Vim or Emacs) that’s menu and mouse friendly while still being lightweight overall, sure, why not? Kate is good for that, Geany also good. You might also look at Sublime (not open source) or a clone like CudaText (open source, bit more of a retro UI).
I wouldn’t use those myself but my preferred posture is different. Use the glove that fits.
I have used CudaText in the past. Maybe I should give it another go, they have a Qt6 build.
Good == you like it.
I don’t like Kate personally. I use (and am addicted to) Sublime Text, but for an open source/free alternative I recommend Gram, or LiteXL. There’s also one called Lapce that I thought was interesting, but I haven’t looked into it in many years so idk if it’s good yet.
For something more sublime-like, there’s Cuda Text, but it’s written in Pascal, an old/dying language, so it’s at higher risk of abandonment because of a lack of contributors.
I find it’s an in between of something like nano vs VSCodium or Zed. It works well for editing single files + has features like syntax highlighting and such, but it is not as powerful as other code editors. And the editors I have mentioned are a step down again from full IDEs (which do their job very well with all the features you could want for debugging and whatnot)
Kate isn’t a bad code editor, I think it does the job while being relatively lightweight compared to VSCodium and especially full IDEs. Zed is very quick so I’ve mostly replaced Kate (and VSCodium) with that, but Kate is an awesome piece of software too!
The thing is, Kate has LSPs, debugger integration, inline hints, compiler integration and warnings, projects and more.
The ecosystem is just not huge and it doesnt have full 3rd party extension support like VSCodium etc
I liked Zed a bit, but I ran into some bugs that made me switch back to my previous editor. I think I’ll give it more of a shot in the future once it’s a bit more mature. Otherwise, I enjoyed how responsive it felt, and having a single toggle to completely turn off AI features was nice.
For Kate, I view it as an alternative to Notepad++. It’s quite a bit more powerful than N++, but to me feels like it fits in around the same place you described between simple text editor and advanced coding IDE. It’s a great default for people who tend to modify a lot of config files.
I really liked zed but didn’t like having to install it everywhere I go… If I’m going for a heavyweight install, it used to be Qt Creator, and lightweight editing in nano (because it’s always there…) I’m not loving Qt Creator so much anymore, but haven’t really replaced it yet either…
I’ve tried zed in the past and it wasn’t bad. Though they seemed to have gone down the AI train ( agentic, built with, … ). Do with that info what you will.
Vscode is a popular one, and there’s a foss version called vscodium ( https://vscodium.com/ ).
As far as free ones go that’s all I know. When it comes to actual coding I prefer the jetbrains tools over the vscode ones. They have a few community versions of their tools ( like pycharm for python development), but I have no idea how limited they are.
I’m not sure what you mean by code editing. If its just editing a yaml file left and right or actually writing code.
Maybe an IDE is overkill for your scenario and you just need an editor with syntax highlighting.
I find Kate out of the box relatively equivalent to VS Codium with a few plugins, for example it provides ESLint and Prettier integrations and VI mode and other cool stuff. But there’s a bug that makes it more TypeScript than JavaScript friendly, it doesn’t identify output of typescript-language-server in JavaScript mode properly. So when I try writing in it code the way I prefer, with JSDoc annotations rather than switching to TypeScript completely, I get proper error messages but it doesn’t highlight the error location right. There are also usability features I miss from Emacs or VS Codium, such as me typing a path to a new file and them automatically creating parent directories (in Kate, that gives an error). But the biggest problem is that Kate randomly corrupts my files, replacing the contents of one file with another.
Regarding divs, I prefer using plain JS, e.g.
div({ id: "content" }, "It works!"), over either JSX or HTML templates, even if that’s perceived as very very weird and I can only do that in personal non-commercial projects.I tried to use it a few times for C++ but it wasn’t intuitive for me and switched to NeoVum.
Honestly, you can’t beat the amount of customization and addons you get with VScode. VSCodium is the non-telemtry version.
And like any good Microsoft product, you can’t trust it because they do absolutely no checking on the extensions, so a bunch of them are malware.
ackshually, you can beat that with vim 😎
