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

[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.

[loganj]

does kate is still banned from run under sudo?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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

I guess they're trying hard to appeal to these 2 users who still use Atom. People who follow fads moved to VS Code a long time ago, as it's better at making the same fundamental mistakes.

Atom is dead, and nobody cares about it these days. Why would anyone want to compete with it? I wouldn't be surprised if Kate is already more popular than Atom.

[khnazile]

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

[kokoko3k]

Is there a valid reason to support both Kwrite and Kate at this point?

Since kwrite is almost 100% a subset of kate's code, i think yes.

[wizard69]

Good question!!!

sometimes it makes more sense to reach for a simple tool. Why they would want to turn their editor into a mess that is Atom is beyond me.

First off the community would be better served served by a very reliable editor. In my mind that means KISS. More complexity just leads to far more bugs, and plug-ins are a big factor. First your plug in architecture has to meet a certain level of quality to not harm over all stability. Then you have the issue of crappy plug ins bringing your editor down. Then we have the hilarity of versions, all of this horror is seen in Eclipse. Yah harping on bad software doesn’t mean that Kate will go that way but keeping plug ins out of the package eliminates the harm these designs do.

{
As an aside my Firefox install went down on my Linux laptop. Im not exactly sure what it was this time but switching a GUI them brought it back together. I had another recent issue that lead me to disable extensions and plug ins. It seems like support of plug-ins really do create reliability problems in software.
}


I woukd prefer that they seek to improve software quality, simplification of the GUI and ignore IDEs like Atom.

Does every text editor have to try to compete with Atom? Editors like Kate and Gedit are fine at the level that theyre at