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.

  • nelson@lemmy.world
    4·
    3 days ago

    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.

    https://zed.dev/

    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.