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

[phoronix]

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

During this week's KDE Akademy 2019 conference there was some planning discussions around improving the Kate text editor...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-Kate-2019-Planning

[geearf]

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

[SpyroRyder]

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

[Daktyl198]

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.

[ssokolow]

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.

To be honest, I think that boat has already sailed. Kate's menus are so voluminous (not to mention having both tabs and that Documents sidebar thing, and support for split views) that I consider it to be more a pale competitor for gVim than a simple text editor.

I run Leafpad on my KDE desktop for that purpose and it does that job nicely, with the only feature that could be called "fancy" being a dumb/naive "Auto Indent" option that replicates the previous line's leading whitespace when you hit Enter.

[ALRBP]

Honestly. I think that if I could have a LanguageTool plugin for Kate (and Kile), I would be completely satisfied by that software. Built-in spellcheck is just, not working…

[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

[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.

[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

[Guest]

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.