Kate

Kate in KDE 4
Developer(s)	The Kate developers
Stable release	3.3.2 / 2009-10-06; 2 months ago
Written in	C++
Platform	Cross-Platform (Linux, BSD, Solaris, Microsoft Windows)
Type	Text editor
License	LGPL/GPL
Website	http://www.kate-editor.org/

In computing, Kate is a text editor for KDE. The name Kate is an acronym for KDE Advanced Text Editor.

Kate has been part of the KDE since release 2.2 in 2001.^[1] Because of the KParts technology, it is possible to embed Kate as an editing component in other KDE applications. The integrated development environment KDevelop, the web development environment Quanta Plus, and the LaTeX front-end Kile are three of the major KDE applications making use of Kate as an editing component.

[edit] Features

Kate is a full-featured programmer's editor with syntax highlighting for over 150 filetypes^[2]. The syntax highlighting is extendable via XML files and can also specify code folding rules.^[3] It has support for search and replace using regular expressions and supports auto-detection of file encodings. Supported encodings include UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO-8859-1 and ASCII.

Kate can be used as a modal text editor by using its Vi Input mode ^[4] which emulates the vi editor.

By using sessions, one can customize Kate for different projects. When using sessions, the list of open files, the list of enabled plugins and the window configuration are saved, allowing Kate to be customized for a given project.^[5]

[edit] KDE Integration

Being a KDE application, Kate can transparently open and save files over all protocols supported by KIO. This includes HTTP, FTP, SSH, SMB and WebDAV.

Kate is built using the KPart technology and the Kate application is just a graphical shell around the editor component, referred to as katepart.^[6] This KPart component is embedded by other KDE programs as well. The Kate application uses the Konsole kpart to get an embedded terminal.

[edit] Plugins and Scripting

Kate can be extended through plugins written in C++ and scripts written in QtScript. Functionality implemented as plugins includes file browsers, ctags support and functionality for building software projects and quickly jumping to compilation errors.

[edit] See also

Free software portal

• List of text editors
• Comparison of text editors

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Official website
• #kate on freenode