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.

  • iusemybrain@sh.itjust.works
    8·
    20 hours ago

    I’ve used it before when trying out IDEs. Its really good, its a no bullshit solution to VS code. If you’ve used sublime text, Kate is similar to that as it is quite minimal.

    On a spectrum of minimalisim and memory consumption, you have emacs, Vi, VIM at the lower end of the curve. This is for users to customize or to use the smallest memory footprint, than in the median its kdevelop/Kate sublime, and VS codium, and on the far end of spectrum you have your bloat software VS code and ItelliJ idea.

    Personally I’m using Vim for my projects in C, C++, Python, octave scripts, sh scripts, and markdown. I like to keep my memory footprint small which is why I use a text editor over a full blown IDE. I have used amd’s Vitis IDE for embedded systems (which is just a fork of VS codium).

    • A_norny_mousse@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      1·
      6 hours ago

      kdevelop

      Huh, yet another KDE app. Installed now. Seems to be just as suitable for my needs as Kate even though it says to be centered around C/C++. Unlike Kate it has something called LSP which might help with automatically adding closing tags; but I have yet to figure out how to activate this. — Huh, Kate has this too. Reading up on it in the Archwiki now.

      VS Code/Codium seems to be omnipresent when diving into the topic, but I just don’t like that it’s controlled by MS, even if these are opensource.