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.
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.