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.
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…