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.

  • TehPers ( TehPers@beehaw.org ) English
    2·
    20 hours ago

    I liked Zed a bit, but I ran into some bugs that made me switch back to my previous editor. I think I’ll give it more of a shot in the future once it’s a bit more mature. Otherwise, I enjoyed how responsive it felt, and having a single toggle to completely turn off AI features was nice.

    For Kate, I view it as an alternative to Notepad++. It’s quite a bit more powerful than N++, but to me feels like it fits in around the same place you described between simple text editor and advanced coding IDE. It’s a great default for people who tend to modify a lot of config files.