The KDE Advanced Text Editor, or Kate, is a source code editor developed by the KDE

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, n ...

community. It has been a part of

KDE Software Compilation The KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC) was an umbrella term for the desktop environment plus a range of included applications produced by KDE. From its 1.0 release in July 1998 until the release of version 4.4 in February 2010, the Software Comp ...

since version 2.2, which was first released in 2001. Intended for software developers, it features

syntax highlighting Syntax highlighting is a feature of text editors that are used for programming, scripting, or markup languages, such as HTML. The feature displays text, especially source code, in different colours and fonts according to the category of terms ...

code folding Code or text folding, or less commonly holophrasting, is a feature of some graphical user interfaces that allows the user to selectively hide ("fold") or display ("unfold") parts of a document. This allows the user to manage large amounts of tex ...

, customizable layouts,

regular expression A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; sometimes referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" ...

support, and extensibility. The text editor's mascot is Kate the Cyber Woodpecker.

History

Kate has been part of the KDE Software Compilation since release 2.2 in 2001. Because of KParts technology, it is possible to embed Kate as an editing component in other KDE applications. Major

KDE applications The KDE Gear (also known as the KDE Applications Bundle or KDE Applications) is a set of applications and supporting libraries that are developed by the KDE community, primarily used on Linux-based operating systems but mostly multiplatform, and ...

which use Kate as an editing component include the

integrated development environment An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools ...

KDevelop, the web development environment

Quanta Plus Quanta Plus, originally called Quanta, is a web Integrated development environment (IDE) for HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, PHP and any other XML-based languages or scripting languages. Quanta was licensed under GPL before the release of version 2.0 fi ...

, and the LaTeX front-end Kile. Kate has won the advanced text editor comparison in '' Linux Voice'' magazine. , development had started to port Kate, along with

Dolphin A dolphin is an aquatic mammal within the infraorder Cetacea. Dolphin species belong to the families Delphinidae (the oceanic dolphins), Platanistidae (the Indian river dolphins), Iniidae (the New World river dolphins), Pontoporiidae (the b ...

Konsole Konsole is a free and open-source terminal emulator graphical application which is part of KDE Applications and ships with the KDE desktop environment. Konsole was originally written by Lars Doelle. It ls licensed under the GPL-2.0-or-later and ...

KDE Telepathy KDE Telepathy is an instant messaging (IM) and voice over IP (VoIP) client which supports text, voice, video, file transfers, and inter-application communication over various IM protocols. It uses the Telepathy framework as its back-end. It i ...

, and Yakuake, to

KDE Frameworks 5 KDE Frameworks is a collection of libraries and software frameworks readily available to any Qt-based software stacks or applications on multiple operating systems. Featuring frequently needed functionality solutions like hardware integration, fi ...

. In 2022, the KDE text-editor KWrite was modified to use the same code base as Kate with deactivated features.

Features

Kate is a source code editor that features syntax highlighting for over 300 file formats with code folding rules. The syntax highlighting is extensible via

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

files. It supports

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit''. UTF-8 is capable of e ...

, UTF-16,

ISO-8859-1 ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in ...

and

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

encoding schemes and can detect a file's

character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values tha ...

automatically. Kate offers code completion and reference finding for various programming languages through its Language Server Protocol Client plugin. The default configuration supports C, C++, D, Fortran, Go,

Latex Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms ...

, Python,

Rust Rust is an iron oxide, a usually reddish-brown oxide formed by the reaction of iron and oxygen in the catalytic presence of water or air moisture. Rust consists of hydrous iron(III) oxides (Fe2O3·nH2O) and iron(III) oxide-hydroxide (FeO( ...

, and

OCaml OCaml ( , formerly Objective Caml) is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language Programming paradigms are a way to classify programming languages based on their features. Languages can be classified into multiple paradigms. ...

. Kate's main text editor widget is called ''KatePart'', which is reusable under the terms of the LGPL version 2 license. It must not be confused with the KParts, a KDE plugin framework for user interface components that Kate also uses. Kate can be used as a modal text editor through its '' vi'' input mode. Kate features

multiple document interface A multiple-document interface (MDI) is a graphical user interface in which multiple windows reside under a single parent window. Such systems often allow child windows to embed other windows inside them as well, creating complex nested hierarchie ...

, window splitting, project editing and sessions to facilitate editing multiple documents. Using ''sessions'', one can customize Kate for different projects by saving the list of open files, the list of enabled plug-ins and the window configuration. Kate includes the KDE terminal emulator

through its Terminal Tool View plugin. As of April 2021, this feature is not available for the Windows version of Kate. The "quick open" feature allows searching opened files by name for quick recalling. Line modification indicators highlight lines with unsaved changes and lines added in the current session. Being a KDE application, Kate transparently opens and saves files over all protocols supported by

KIO KIO (KDE Input/Output) is a system library incorporated into KDE Frameworks 5 and KDE Software Compilation 4. It provides access to files, web sites and other resources through a single consistent API. Applications, such as Konqueror and Do ...

libraries. This includes

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide We ...

, FTP, SSH, SMB and

WebDAV WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which allows user agents to collaboratively author contents ''directly'' in an HTTP web server by providing facilities for con ...

, among others. , unlike Xed, ''Kate'' is equipped with a session manager which allows naming, saving, and restoring sessions, meaning a list of momentarily open file tabs. Saved sessions are stored as key-value-formatted *.katesession files into ~/.local/share/kate/sessions/. Other features are a

clipboard A clipboard is a thin, rigid board with a clip at the top for holding paper in place. A clipboard is typically used to support paper with one hand while writing on it with the other, especially when other writing surfaces are not available. The ...

history with up to ten items, the ability to jump to a line number,"The editor holds a clipboard history that contains up to 10 clipboard entries."
/ref> and

source control In software engineering, version control (also known as revision control, source control, or source code management) is a class of systems responsible for managing changes to computer programs, documents, large web sites, or other collections o ...

integration using

Git Git () is a distributed version control system: tracking changes in any set of files, usually used for coordinating work among programmers collaboratively developing source code during software development. Its goals include speed, data in ...

References

External links

* {{KDE Applications using D-Bus Free text editors KDE Applications Unix text editors

History

Features

See also

References

External links