this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2026
49 points (93.0% liked)

Linux

68475 readers
377 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
nooter692@lemmy.ml
MarcellusDrum@lemmy.ml
cypherpunks@lemmy.ml
cyclohexane@lemmy.ml
49
Compared to All That's Out There, is KDE's Kate a Good Code Editor? (piefed.social)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by A_norny_mousse@piefed.social to c/linux@lemmy.ml
26 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] iusemybrain@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I've used it before when trying out IDEs. Its really good, its a no bullshit solution to VS code. If you've used sublime text, Kate is similar to that as it is quite minimal.

On a spectrum of minimalisim and memory consumption, you have emacs, Vi, VIM at the lower end of the curve. This is for users to customize or to use the smallest memory footprint, than in the median its kdevelop/Kate sublime, and VS codium, and on the far end of spectrum you have your bloat software VS code and ItelliJ idea.

Personally I'm using Vim for my projects in C, C++, Python, octave scripts, sh scripts, and markdown. I like to keep my memory footprint small which is why I use a text editor over a full blown IDE. I have used amd's Vitis IDE for embedded systems (which is just a fork of VS codium).

[–] A_norny_mousse@piefed.social 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

kdevelop

Huh, yet another KDE app. Installed now. Seems to be just as suitable for my needs as Kate even though it says to be centered around C/C++. ~~Unlike Kate~~ it has something called LSP which might help with automatically adding closing tags; but I have yet to figure out how to activate this.

Huh, Kate has this too. Reading up on it in the Archwiki now.

VS Code/Codium seems to be omnipresent when diving into the topic, but I just don't like that it's controlled by MS, even if these are opensource.