 Vim is one of my favorite Linux applications ever. I've talked about Vim on this channel in Numerable times like I talk about it a ton I'm a big fanboy of Vim and I tried to get as many people to use Vim as possible now obviously I have Meandered in the last month or so and have tried nano and I really liked nano But it wasn't really for me because and you can say this with me if you've watched that video nano is not Vim, right? I'm such a big proponent and user of Vim It's hard for me to go use something else And that's really what I learned when I went to use nano was just that I like Vim too much to use anything else But that doesn't mean that I'm not gonna continue to try because I like try new things and it does give me some content for the channel So today I'm going to be talking about an application that I've used many times before But haven't really given a chance to and that is the Kate text editor now Kate is a built-in Katie application. It is obviously a Katie application. It starts with a K So of course it does it is and it is like all Katie applications very very very full featured sometimes you think probably to his detriment But I actually haven't found that to be the case. It's actually been a very Steady text editor in the times that I've been using it So today we're gonna be talking about Kate and how it is kind of won me over a little bit from them We'll talk about more of that later. So let's go ahead and jump in but before we do if you if you would Give me a like on the video. I'd really appreciate it that really would help the channel It just would be super awesome of you. So thank you so very much for doing that now Let's go ahead and jump in so let's take a look at Kate This right here is Kate and even if you've probably never seen a KDE application before you'd be able to tell that This is in fact a Katie application. It looks like a Katie application, right? It's got all the features that you'd expect as you know toolbars all over the place And if you were to go to the settings panel, you'd see that there are a ton of settings and stuff like that So it is a very Katie application right out of the box and I haven't done very much to configure it the look of and feel of it It just doesn't really need it to me I just use it the way it is and it does a really really good job of just being a very good application in terms of UI in general, but there's obviously more to an application than how it looks right? How does this thing function me and why am I saying that it's kind of pulling me away from them? I'll talk about that later, but in terms of features Kate has basically everything that you could ask for now You guys have to remember that I'm not a developer a programmer or anything of the kind I am learning Python a little bit and I've been using Kate to do that So I have a miniscule amount of coding experience inside of Kate. So just to qualify my opinions here know that I'm not an expert on any of this stuff But I will say from my point of view it has everything that you would need if you're a developer but also if you're a writer or if you are working in markdown or it basically any of the languages that it supports, you know Writing bash scripts or PowerShell or PHP any of this stuff that it supports It does a really good job of all of this stuff I would say it's very close to VS code in terms of simple functionality And when I say that what I mean is that it doesn't have as many plugins as VS code So there's a lot more you can do with VS code because the ecosystem is so Grand Kate doesn't have that. It does have plugins. There are quite a few of them But it doesn't have that breadth of plug-in ecosystem Also people who use VS code are very into using VS code. So leaving it probably isn't you know something that they're willing to do But if you if VS code hasn't sunk its teeth into you yet Kate is a good starting point and maybe something that you could set up in a way that your workflow Suits this better than VS code ever would so let's go ahead and go through some of the features And we'll start off with some of the UI features Obviously some of these UI features are just bog standard for a lot of code editors and stuff like that So it's not gonna make anything special here for Kate But it I just want to show them to you so that you can see that they have them So they have the overall document preview over here. I'm sure that there's some You know fancy name that this thing has over here, but they have that you can split So if you wanted to split vertical you could do that so you could have splits and then you could have obviously tabs along the Top for different files of you if you're creating a website you could have the style that CSS and the JavaScript file and the HTML file all open at the same time and switch between them very easily There's built-in terminal support So if you needed to do work in the terminal or work inside of the project folder you can do that There's built in a high quality search So if you need to do search and replace within your document and you needed to put conditions and filters on top of that search You can do so it's much more refined than Something like them if you wanted to do a lot of this stuff in them You'd have to know a lot of regex here You don't have to know how all that regex because it does a lot of that stuff for you it also has the traditional project tree and Open document tree and things like that So if you need to if you need to navigate the file system you can do that very easily right here along the side You can obviously Configure all the stuff to open up upon launch if you want to do that So if you if you always know you want to have the tree open you can you can have that set up like that very very easily It also supports sessions So if you are doing multiple different projects, but you don't want that all their their tabs and splits and all this stuff to intermingle you could go and create a brand new session just like so and You know open up another instance of a document or another project or whatever and then you could go Save this session to another one the session to and then if you opened up a new session You could you know switch between them or whatever you wanted to do right? It's a great way at project management if you're doing more than more than one project Which a lot of people usually do more than one project in this way you can kind of keep them organized and separate I have when I was working with this on in one of my VMs Basically, what I did is I had all my my Python stuff in one Session and then I was doing some bash scripting in another session and just kind of kept them separate Which is really nice and again this this is I'm positive the other Code editors and stuff like that have this the same functionality But Kate is my first kind of introduction to that kind of stuff So I found it very impressive now obviously in terms of actually coding inside of Kate It has functionality for all of that stuff as well including tab completion and LSP support So obviously most of that stuff will require additional Dependencies things like if you wanted to use the Python you'll need the LSP Python Library a package it's gonna be named something different on every single distro But you'll need a package and it will usually tell you what that package is going to be down here I haven't got it set up quite yet I just switched to Debbie and yesterday so I haven't get it all set up And I'll probably just do that in the VM that I set up for my my programming course But like I said, there will be dependencies for all these things and like I said It supports a ton of different languages and stuff like that So if you go down here, you can just see you know, it's you know supports a lot of like open scad but I could just read these for days and days and days and still just continue on and Continue on reading them for days and days more so if there is a language that you're you know wanting to use It does support a lot of that stuff some not all of it I don't think will be supported with LSP, but it does support syntax highlighting of a lot of languages So if you're coding in a like if you're coding in like Haskell or whatever like that You can get LSP support set up very very easily and it works basically how you'd expect it to work So, you know, I like said, I don't have it working here because I don't have the paths and stuff set up properly Yet, but you know, if you're doing like import it would it would show you Options for auto-completion and stuff like that and do it as you go along It'll show you definitions and how your variables are stacked and all this stuff, right? So if you are a developer and you can tell I'm not one given by the fact that I don't know what the hell I'm talking about It does show you all of this stuff that you would expect from all other, you know fully featured code editors Which is again a very good feature Another thing that I wanted to talk about of course is the key bindings Now key bindings in a KDE application are a dime a dozen And I say that because they're almost every single KDE application has a ton of key bindings and K is no different So you can customize every single key binding in this editor to your heart's content Like you could spend as much time as you want making this text editor yours in terms of key binding every single option Movement tool bar Terminal all this stuff gives you an option for key binding to control it And you can change what those key bindings are now like I said This is not a feature that only belongs to Kate but in traditional KDE fashion They do a better job of literally allowing you to change basically anything when it comes to Keybindings and stuff like that and one of the coolest things about a lot of KDE applications Including K is that you can have multiple schemes So if you are a weirdo and have multiple key binding scheme needs Saying that was really hard So for say for example, you wanted to have both an emacs like scheme and of them like scheme You could do that if you wanted to and then you could change between them very easily just by doing something like this Why you'd want to have to I mean your muscle memory would be all over the place Maybe you don't want to develop muscle memory You want to be keep your your keep yourself on your toes or something like that Maybe that's the reason why you want to do that, but you can do that if you want to my favorite feature of Kate is Them mode or what they call by mode I call it the mode just because I want to call it the mode But it's really by mode So if you go up to the edit button or the edit menu and then you go to input modes and click by mode Basically, what happens is that it get puts you immediately into normal mode So you can use hjkl to move around Like so you can hit I to go into insert mode. You can hit DD to delete a line You can hit you to undo control R to redo Basically anything you can do inside of I you can now do inside of Kate So this is one of the reasons why I said this is kind of winning me over from them now first of all It's not gonna Make me stop using them. I once I go to a window manager I'll no longer want to use a gooey again For whatever reason when I'm in a window manager I'm much more likely to want to use the terminal when I'm in a desktop environment like I am right now I'm much more interested in using a gooey. I don't know why I feel that way. It's really weird But that's just kind of the way my Brain works. So when I'm using a gooey editor I want my Vim binding still and this allows me to have that now now it works phenomenally well, it's almost like Vi or Vim is right here in front of me, but with all of the accoutrements of I'm not French. So I apologize for that right away I All of the bells and whistles of a gooey application are here while still along allowing me to have the motion so I can You know go 10 J and it'll go down 10 lines. I go, you know 10 K and it'll go up 10 lines You know, it's just very good and visual mode is here as well You can do visual block mode if you wanted to you can even use command mode if you wanted to use command mode and One of the coolest things if he is if you have a whole bunch of custom key bindings inside of your Vim RC You can actually import your Vim RC key bindings right inside of Kate So you have all of those available to you So if you use a custom leader key or something like that a lot of that stuff can be imported right here inside of Kate I don't think that's going to import your plugins and stuff like that So don't get excited there But if you have a whole bunch of key bindings that work with your Vim You can import them indicate and that's really nice. Let's go ahead and take a look a little bit at this the settings So there are in traditional Katie Application fashion a ton of settings the best part the absolute best part is the search panel because this is not something that a Lot of Katie applications actually have and in order to you know navigate through this the settings panel They have a search button here And if you wanted to search for like vi mode like so you can find all of the Settings for vi input mode so you can choose that you can make it so that vi is the default mode You can choose you can see here where all of the vi settings are Including custom key linings and stuff for normal mode insert mode and visual mode You can do all that stuff from right here And the search box is just a phenomenal thing to have when you have this many settings And it's pretty rare a lot of settings a lot of applications that throw a ton of settings that you don't do a good Job of discoverability of those settings and that's a big problem in a lot of Katie applications But not in this one there are a lot of settings for appearance So you can choose you know the font the font size line space the style of the cursor and How much the show the indentation line? So if you wanted to make sure everything's intended to the proper length you can do that You can show the line numbers you can not show the line numbers you can change the color scheme So you can download a whole bunch of different color schemes If you want it comes with a whole bunch of them actually installed, which is nice Usually you'd only have like a few color schemes But this one has quite a few color schemes already pre-installed plus of course you can create your own Which is I mean have fun. I think I will you can change a lot of the settings for general editing and text navigation and indentation So if you're particular on how many spaces you use for tabs and so on and so forth You can make all those changes here. You can change how it saves and save behavior You can change it a lot of the other behaviors as well when it comes to Tabs and sidebars and things like that. The one thing I haven't noticed is a place where you can move the tabs to the bottom I haven't seen that particular Feature here anywhere. So maybe that's missing Which is a little bit disappointing because I prefer them to be along the bottom But whatever not that big a deal you can change how sessions are done You can change Auto load of sessions you can so if you wanted to load the last session So if you're always coming back to the same project, you could do that and just have it load the last session That's nice. Here are the plugins that they have available to you one thing that they Don't seem to have as a way to upload manual Plugins now it's possible that there's like a file somewhere that you could drop a plugin into and then it would just appear here But normally when a KDE application has extra additional third-party functionality to be added to it They have a button that you would click on down here is like Get new schemes or get new plugins or whatever, but that doesn't seem to be here so there aren't that many plugins, but there are quite a few and The one thing is that I'm seem to be missing are like a live preview of like markdown HTML and stuff like that. I don't see any of that kind of stuff here. Actually might literally just be right there Let's see here. Let's go here if we go to preview. No, that's not the right one Maybe it's you gotta press no. I don't know. It's possible That that just needs some setup setting up or something like that. I'm not sure I think I did some googling and then they do have it built-in, but I'm just not sure how to set that up But anyways, like I said, there are plugins here not a lot of them But you'll probably find what you're looking for here. Anyways, there's a lot of settings here for the LSP client as well You can see allow and block servers You can change a lot of the client settings. They're there the color picker here is actually a plugin that I installed Which is if you're working in any HTML or CSS or whatever, that's really invaluable And there's some settings for project because there is get integration. So if you want to Integrate your your git repositories and Push merge stash do all that stuff right from inside of of Kate you can do that And as you can see, there's just a ton of different features here in settings that you can change and kind of customized To make Kate as much your own as possible and that's a great thing for an ID, which is basically what Kate has become It's not a text editor Even though that's what I usually use it for so that is Kate It is awesome and like I said, it has pulled me away from using Vim while I'm here in plasma Whether or not I'll continue to use it when I'm in a window manager I don't know maybe a little bit because I do it does seem to handle large Files better than Vim does and I deal with really like many lined files in my day jobs So maybe I'll end up using Kate a little bit more often just because of that fact Why Vim continues to be a little bit slower than it should be for me I still don't know probably a plug-in somewhere along the line But I'm not giving up my fault my plug-ins. So, you know, whatever. It's my fault. Whatever it is Anyways, so that is Kate if you have thoughts on Kate, you can leave those in the comment section below I did not go over every single feature. I would have been here for days to do that So I just kind of went over the ones that were important to me But if you have questions, you can leave those in the comment section below if you have comments down there as well If you haven't already leave a thumbs up on this video and would really help the channel You can follow me on mastodon or honestly those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast Thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon and YouTube you guys are all absolutely amazing without you The channel just would not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very very much for your support I truly do appreciate it. You guys are all awesome. Thank you so very very much for your support Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time