Kate the woodpecker

History

Kate first appeared in the KDE Software Compilation with version 2.2 back in 2001. Thanks to KParts, other KDE programs can use it as an embedded editing component; KDevelop, Quanta Plus, and Kile are notable examples. Linux Voice magazine once judged it the best advanced text editor. In 2014, work began to move Kate, along with Dolphin, Konsole, KDE Telepathy, and Yakuake, to KDE Frameworks 5. KWrite was updated in 2022 to share Kate’s codebase, just with some features turned off. Then, in February 2024, Kate was updated to KDE Frameworks 6 and Qt 6 as part of KDE Gear 24.02.

Features

Kate provides syntax highlighting for over 300 file formats with code folding rules, extensible via XML files. It supports UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO-8859-1, and ASCII encoding schemes and can detect a file's character encoding automatically. Through its Language Server Protocol Client plugin, Kate offers code completion and reference finding for various programming languages, with default support for C, C++, D, Fortran, Go, Latex, Python, Rust, and OCaml.

The main text editor widget, KatePart, is reusable under LGPL version 2 and is distinct from KParts, a KDE plugin framework. Kate can function as a modal text editor via its vi input mode. It features a multiple document interface, window splitting, project editing, and sessions for customizing open files, enabled plug-ins, and window configuration per project. The quick open feature searches opened files by name, and line modification indicators highlight unsaved changes and lines added in the current session.

As a KDE application, Kate opens and saves files over protocols supported by KIO libraries, including HTTP, FTP, SSH, SMB, and WebDAV. Its session manager allows naming, saving, and restoring sessions, stored as key-value-formatted *.katesession files in ~/.local/share/kate/sessions/. Other features include a clipboard history of up to ten items, the ability to jump to a line number, and source control integration using Git.