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.

  • firn@lemmy.ml
    2·
    8 hours ago

    Man we’re the same person lol I too use geany for basically everything and tried out Kate because it felt more feature complete but it just isn’t. There is nothing I can do on Kate that I can’t do in Geany that is relevant to me. Mostly Lua programming and markdown editing.

    I’d say just make a theme that fits the KDE style and use some breeze icons in the editor to make it feel more like it belongs and use what works and is comfortable.

    I still use gnome and so I made a gnome builder editor theme and made the whole editor look like gnome builder and it works wonderfully. I bet the same is possible for kde.