KDE's Kate Text Editor Plans Improvements To Better Compete With Atom

[Termy]

its been a while since i tried atom, but for the light scripting/python i do, kate always felt way more pleasant. Results may vary for bigger codes, of course ^^

Improvements are always welcomed, but for me and my needs kate hits the perfect sweetspot of functionality without being too bloated

[cl333r]

Does it still hog all of your computer's memory effectively hanging system if you open 2-gigabyte text file?
vim/mcedit would open something like that just fine

I can hardly think of a more worthless feature.

[Linuxhippy]

Everytime I read about some KDE project trying to compete with some established open-source software I have to wonder why this is desirable at all.
The KDE-Project seems to be quite understaffed with bugs on core-components staying open for years, yet it seems to be a proirity of the project to make its text editor better to compete with all those already available open-source text editors out there just for the sake of ... using the KDE libraries?

I am just a user and even stopped reporting bugs a few years ago, so my opinion doesn't have any weight really, however I just wonder.

[schmidtbag]

I'm a big fan of the LSP thing, and I'm not sure what exactly they intend to do about code navigation, but I'm interested to see what they do with it.

I agree with Spyro. Why do people think there is no market for a simple, light text editor? If I want solid language support and plugins, I'd install VSCode, Atom, Sublime-Text, or one of the other editors that already do that very well.

Don't be a Windows Phone, Kate, coming into a saturated market too late with half the features. Just be a text editor.

Eh... KATE is only lightweight if you're already using KDE. But also, KATE isn't that simple (for a text editor). In fact, it seems to have more built-in features than almost anything else I've used. It's already a pretty good platform, so, I don't really see the problem in giving it a few additions here and there to make it more "universal". So, it's not going to be half-baked, because it's already been past that point before they even mentioned this goal.

I don't disagree that there's not really a need to compete with Atom, but, if Atom is doing things that are pulling people away from them, then that's a good incentive to maybe try implementing some of those things. That being said... the tight integration with KDE is probably doing them the most harm. It's great if you're a KDE user, but not so great for anyone else.

Anyway, there are already plenty of simple light text editors. If that is all you're looking for, that's what Kwrite is.

[loganj]

does kate is still banned from run under sudo?

[carewolf]

does kate is still banned from run under sudo?

Yes, it is generally not a good idea to do with Qt applications (or any other big UI toolkit, or anything running X11 in general). It is kind of paranoid, but it is there for a reason, any user-space infection could piggy pack on a sudo of a non-trivial application to gain root.

[Vistaus]

I'm a big fan of the LSP thing, and I'm not sure what exactly they intend to do about code navigation, but I'm interested to see what they do with it.


Eh... KATE is only lightweight if you're already using KDE. But also, KATE isn't that simple (for a text editor). In fact, it seems to have more built-in features than almost anything else I've used. It's already a pretty good platform, so, I don't really see the problem in giving it a few additions here and there to make it more "universal". So, it's not going to be half-baked, because it's already been past that point before they even mentioned this goal.

I don't disagree that there's not really a need to compete with Atom, but, if Atom is doing things that are pulling people away from them, then that's a good incentive to maybe try implementing some of those things. That being said... the tight integration with KDE is probably doing them the most harm. It's great if you're a KDE user, but not so great for anyone else.

Anyway, there are already plenty of simple light text editors. If that is all you're looking for, that's what Kwrite is.

Kate isn't as lightweight as it used to be, though. Kate 5.16.x uses 26-27 MB with no files open on my system, while good ol' Kate 2.5.14 (now part of TDE) uses just 15 MB with no files open on my system.

And yes, I know 26-27 MB is not much at all, esp. with my 8 GB of RAM, but they still managed to somehow make it use 10 MB more under KDE 5 compared to the old version on TDE.. For a web browser, I wouldn't even have bothered to comment but for a text editor, I consider that quite a lot.

[schmidtbag]

Kate isn't as lightweight as it used to be, though. Kate 5.16.x uses 26-27 MB with no files open on my system, while good ol' Kate 2.5.14 (now part of TDE) uses just 15 MB with no files open on my system.

And yes, I know 26-27 MB is not much at all, esp. with my 8 GB of RAM, but they still managed to somehow make it use 10 MB more under KDE 5 compared to the old version on TDE.. For a web browser, I wouldn't even have bothered to comment but for a text editor, I consider that quite a lot.

KATE by itself (either as a program or its RAM usage) isn't all that heavy. It's all the dependencies that really add up. Like I said before, if you're already using KDE, it's no big deal.

[Termy]

does kate is still banned from run under sudo?

it is, but you get a KDEsu-Dialogue when you want to save a system file, so the only instance where this is an issue can be 600/700 rights.

[khnazile]

I can hardly think of a more worthless feature.

Get out of you bubble, this is real-world task. Multi-gigabyte text files, mailboxes with 80k of unread messages, directories with 0.5 million of photos is something that happens to real people in their everyday life. And you should expect that standard tools at least won't crash your computer if you try doing something like that. Unfortunately, most of Linux generic desktop software still fails if given large-scale tasks.