Kate (text editor)


The KDE Advanced Text Editor, or 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.
"Kate the woodpecker" is the mascot of Kate editor, designed by Tyson Tan in 2014.

History

Kate has been part of the KDE Software Compilation since release 2.2 in 2001. Because of KParts 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.
, 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 300 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.
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.

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 the KParts framework; it is a graphical shell around the editor component, referred to as katepart.