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.
If you need a GUI editor, Zed is pretty great. But I’m a Helix editor user in the terminal.
Last time I tried Zed, it wouldn’t recognize the space key because I have two keyboard layouts configured and I use the second one for everything (Dvorak, but I have to keep Qwerty as the main so games running through Proton will map keys correctly)
I’ll have to check if they’ve fixed that, I was very disappointed I couldn’t try it out at the time
They fixed it! I had the same issue (and some others for multiple or non-us keyboard layouts) but they have fixed many of them
If thinking about zed, Gram is a mandatory mention. https://gram.liten.app/
This is really nice. I never heard of it before.
🦀