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.
Sure, yes, auto-completion/-closing brackets, smart indendation, are standard features of most code editors. Kate also has a LSP plugin and external programs are easily setup. And features like ctrl+b to mark a line, i found no good extension in vscodium.
This from kwrite.
Huh, yet another KDE app. It seems they all build on the same base, with increasing feature richness:
Kwrite => Kate => Kdevelop
?
I wouldn’t use “=>”…they serve different purposes. But yes, they are all build with the same editor components (ktexteditor). Kwrite for example has no tab support…making it not really useful for editing more than one file at a time…but is simpler to use so rather useful for quick config file editing.
Kate is a full fledged text editor with plugin and LSP support. So it can serve as editor for programming but also as editor for other tasks that require some organizing and multiple files.
kdevelop is a IDE. It includes a lot more tools that aren’t strictly editor related (for example tools for easier looking through git patches before submitting them) but it is pretty much only geared towards programming (and there for specific languages like c, cpp, python or php)
Not mention…but kile is a editor specified on creating latex document which also uses the same editor component.