this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2026
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Compared to All That's Out There, is KDE's Kate a Good Code Editor? (piefed.social)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) by A_norny_mousse@piefed.social to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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.

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[–] Lemmert@reddthat.com 5 points 1 day ago

It's alright. I actually was on a similar, albeit just a month long, phase when I switched to KDE. I used VSCodium before and switched (back?) to VSCode after two weeks.

The main reason was extension support. I didn't notice how much I leaned on those before switching. For example taking notes became more cumbersome and journaling in Typst became impossible (from the editor at least). I have been expecting a lot from my IDE that aren't really its responsibilities.

Actually programming was a perfectly fine experience so I kept trying to make it work. But at some point a project required me to run dev containers. I had VSCode installed for that anyway so that was the end of it. Though by now I have basically completely switched to Neovim.

I recommend trying out Neovim (Maybe Emacs but I personally never tried it). Or if you prefer a GUI, or don't want to learn their system, definitely give VSCodium or VSCode a shot. Those four have a much greater assortment of plugins so it'll be a lot easier to get your editor to behave how you want it to. Though this comes at the cost of a higher memory and cpu footprint.