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.

  • ulterno@programming.devEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • A_norny_mousse@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      11·
      3 days ago

      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.

      • ulterno@programming.devEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        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.