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

[skeevy420]

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.

Plus it can be set as the "sudoedit" text editor.

Be aware that either Kate or sudoedit acts up if Kate is already open and the sudoedit file opens in a new tab. Any changes made to the file won't be saved. Close Kate, let sudoedit open Kate with only the sudoedit file active and everything works as expected.

[skeevy420]

Kate 19.08.1 using a tad over 19MB here

19.08.0 with 85MB here

Around 1800 lines of bash & zsh script over 5 files

[skeevy420]

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.

Funny story. Started Linux as a Gnome user. Eventually moved on to XFCE, before Gnome 3 was a concept so that wasn't a factor..I liked XFCE's right click menu on the desktop (seriously...that was enough to convert me from Gnome to Xfce like 12 years ago). When I moved on to XFCE, I did not like their text editors and kept on using Gedit.

Eventually Gedit based on GTK3 came out and I was all WTF is this crap. I tried to use it. I just couldn't. Went and started installing a bunch of different text editors, stuff I'd normally never use due to "why TF do I need all these dependencies" and ended up liking Kate out of all of them. A couple of weeks later I was looking at the different sessions available in the login menu and thought I'd give that Plasma thingy a shot. I was really leery because my first KDE experience was KDE4 and I just did not like it at all. Plasma, OTOH, just clicked with me and I've been a Plasma user ever since. Thanks, Kate.

[dnebdal]

No, it happens to weird people and admins who can't get their shit together.

Oh get over yourself. Multi-GB text files are a common enough feature of scientific work - I work at a cancer genetics lab, and stupid-huge csv files are entirely routine. Of course, opening them in a GUI editor is less common (I'd typically use R), but it's not exactly exotic either.

[bug77]

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 19.08.1 using a tad over 19MB here

[cl333r]

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.

No, it happens to weird people and admins who can't get their shit together.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.