Developer(s) KDE Written in C++ | Development status Active | |
 | ||
Initial release 2001; 16 years ago (2001) Stable release 16.12.1 (12 January 2017; 57 days ago (2017-01-12)) [±] Repository quickgit.kde.org?p=kate.git | ||
The KDE Advanced Text Editor (Kate) is a text editor developed by the KDE free software community. It has been a part of KDE Software Compilation since version 2.2, which was first released in 2001. Intended for software developers, it features syntax highlighting, code folding, customizable layouts, regular expression support, and extensibility.
Contents
History
Kate has been part of the KDE Software Compilation since release 2.2 in 2001. Because of KPart's technology, it is possible to embed Kate as an editing component in other KDE applications. Major KDE applications which use Kate as an editing component include the integrated development environment KDevelop, the web development environment Quanta Plus, and the LaTeX front-end Kile.
Kate has won the advanced text editor comparison in Linux Voice magazine.
As of July 2014 development had started to port Kate, along with Dolphin, Konsole, KDE Telepathy, and Yakuake, to KDE Frameworks 5.
Features
Kate is a programmer's text editor that features syntax highlighting for over 200 file formats with code folding rules. The syntax highlighting is extensible via XML files. It supports UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO-8859-1 and ASCII encoding schemes and can detect a file's character encoding automatically.
Kate can be used as a modal text editor through its vi input mode which emulates a Unix text editor with the same name.
Kate features multiple document interface, window splitting, project editing and sessions to facilitate editing multiple documents. Using sessions, one can customize Kate for different projects by saving the list of open files, the list of enabled plug-ins and the window configuration.
For searching and replacing text, Kate features incremental search, multi-line search and replace and regular expression support. It can perform search and replace on multiple files.
KDE integration
Being a KDE application, Kate transparently opens and saves files over all protocols supported by KIO libraries. This includes HTTP, FTP, SSH, SMB and WebDAV, among others.
Kate is built using KPart's framework; it is a graphical shell around the editor component, referred to as katepart. This KPart component is embedded by other KDE programs as well. Kate uses Konsole to get an embedded terminal.