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原始链接: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40032869

该用户分享了他们在 2000 年代末从 Windows 切换到 Linux 的经验，强调了使用 Kate 等应用程序进行 SQL 开发和在 Linux 上使用 Amarok 进行媒体播放的好处。他们对 KDE 4 所采取的方向表示失望，导致他们返回旧版本或采用 XFCE 等替代桌面。用户赞赏 KDE 3.5 提供的高水平定制功能，并对新版本中此类功能的丧失感到遗憾。他们还比较了软件变更背后的开发人员理念，包括影响 Mozilla 浏览器和 KDE 的变更，并分享了他们对本地管理媒体库而非订阅服务的偏好。这是一个总结版本：大约在 2004-2005 年，由于与 Windows 相比，Kate 的 SQL 开发速度更快，并且通过 Amarok 改进了媒体播放，用户转向了 Linux。然而，他们对 KDE 4 版本感到不满意，因此恢复到早期版本或采用 XFCE。他们钦佩 KDE 3.5 广泛的定制功能，并批评较新的版本偏离了这种方法。此外，与流媒体平台相比，他们更喜欢自我管理的音乐收藏，并赞扬凯特的文本编辑器功能。

Kate was one of the main reasons I switched to Linux in 2004/2005.

I had a lab in MySQL, and back then, the only option to develop in Windows was MySQL Workbench, which was as heavy as it got. Running an SQL statement was painfully slow, and iteration cycles were huge.

In Linux, you would write your SQL in Kate, and run MySQL's cli in the embedded terminal. Once ready, you would click the button “pipe to terminal". Instant run. What took many minutes in Windows took less than 2 seconds in Linux. How can you not love this?

Another reason was Amarok, an (the) mp3 player. Do you like how Spotify and other providers create automatically infinite playlists, radios, etc based on your tastes? Yes, KDE had this since 2002 I think? It was first copied by iTunes, then by Spotify, and now is considered a standard function. :)

Also k3b was an amazing software for burning CDs back then, its interface easily rivaled contemporary proprietary software.

KDE 3.5 was one of the peaks (if not the peak) of graphical interfaces on GNU/Linux.

Experiencing KDE at the time I was used to the Windows XP interface felt amazing, and soon after Vista promises of innovation on interface were nothing compared to what could be done in Compiz (More on the Gnome 2 side).

KDE4 is a sad story. It ruined the reputation of KDE for a very long time. I loved KDE 3.5, but then came back to KDE only in 2021.

It's mostly just a problem of communication. KDE 4.0 should not have been marked as stable and should not been used by distros. If they baked KDE4 for two more years and on the side maintained/developed 3.5, the transition might be much smoother.

While there were some bugs in early KDE 4, those were not the main problem.

No amount of baking could have saved it.

The main problem was caused by the completely different purposes of the new developers, who have removed all the outstanding customization features of KDE 3.5.

For me, indeed KDE 3.5 has been the best graphic desktop that I have ever seen. Neither before, nor after and neither on Apple or Windows have I encountered anything as good.

The main reason for this was that KDE 3.5 allowed extreme customization, so you could make your own graphic desktop that did not resemble at all the default desktop.

After the shock of experiencing the garbage KDE 4, even if I had waited a half of year before making the transition, with the hope that any major bugs would be solved, I have reverted to KDE 3.5 for a few years, until it had become much to painful to make upgrades in such a way as to not damage it.

Then I have switched to XFCE, which does not provide as much as the old KDE 3.5, but at least it does not get in the way of your work with undesirable and hard to remove features. Moreover, any useful KDE applications, such as Kate, work perfectly fine on XFCE, together with any useful Gnome applications.

The same kind of developer philosophy, that users are dumb and they must be prevented from customizing the application has characterized the developers who have converted the Mozilla browser into Firefox, which is another unwelcome change that I have greatly hated.

> The same kind of developer philosophy, that users are dumb and they must be prevented from customizing the application

The more holistic view is that every customization path incurs a support burden.

If you have 3 options to support, you can engineer and test the heck out of each option. 15 options? Not so much.

So having those 12 extra options not only creates permanent extra workload, as dev time is finite you’ve effectively made the 3 aforementioned options worse off.

Another problem with KDE 4 was the buzzword technologies pushed everywere - semantic desktop with Nepomuk (nice research project but not fit for normal use), plasma applet UI added to applications (why?), activities replacing virtual desktops but not really.

That version thing was frustrating because it was an unforced error. Surely someone, at some point, brought up that people would expect the version number to mean that it was ready for use. But they chose to proceed with using their idiosyncratic version scheme, and unsurprisingly suffered a reputation hit for it.

Agreed! I recently switched from a very custom Linux setup with a tiling window manager and all kinds of bells and whistles. The Plasma 6 release in combination with running NixOS which makes trying things out both easily and safely convinced me to give it a shot and I simply haven't left. It took some setup, of course, but Plasma is wonderfully configurable and has everything I wanted available with some tweaking.

Whereas GNOME and others required extensions, which are often out of date or somewhat sketchy -- before I could set things up how I like.

Big fan so far.

Exactly what happened to me too! Been using a Sway setup on NixOS for many many years, and I was just curious to try out Plasma 6. After a small config change, I had the desktop up and running, and I was impressed how it felt like. You can even use plasma-manager to store your KDE settings to a nix configuration, which make it easy to have a unified configuration across different computers.

https://github.com/pjones/plasma-manager

kde6 has lost the ability to change the window manager :( I have a wonderful xmonad + kde5 setup on my work laptop but had to stick with mate on my personal machine (not worth fighting with my distro to downgrade to kde5)

I had a love-hate relationship with k3b because years ago it was the only cd burner program that was both somewhat stable and otherwise not terrible on Linux, but also it was the only KDE program I just had to have on my XFCE Gentoo system, which meant compiling allllll of kde libs and qt and losing a bunch of disk space to them.

Yes! When I started using Kate on Linux ca. 2005, I was coming from Notepad on Windows and couldn’t believe how nice it was. I believe it was my first experience of syntax highlighting.

And Amarok! I haven’t thought of that in a while. Losing Amarok was my single biggest regret when I became a Max user. I’ve not used anything since that came close.

What about Clementine or Strawberry? Clementine was a fork of Amarok 1.4, and Strawberry a fork of Clementine.

I recently discovered Strawberry would play music off of my Subsonic server (Navidrome really) and was thrilled to have something for music that didn't feel like a web app.

Notepad++ would have been very new at that time. I don't know what those early releases were like.

But there were similar editors. I remember using SCIte which was similar to Notepad++. SCIte was first released in 1999.

I think people who got excited about streaming (one low price and you get whatever music you want on tap) have started to realize it isn't as nice as it seems (music disappears, they push music you don't want, and don't support artists like CDs do) and so developers are coming back to local clients that you control managing music you own.

You forget, on windows, we had WAMP with phpmysql so we could run queries in our browser. Not being able to do them within an IDE until around 2001 with Dreamweaver and Microsoft InterDev…

Kate is cool but it wasn’t the first to have this.

Haha, indeed! I was pretty frustrated with configuring WAMP, though. Once I started spending more time on Linux and noticed that Linux was using the slash instead of the backslash for directories and all other OS differences, suddenly, the WAMP configuration made a lot of sense and became one more reason to switch permanently to Linux.

Interesting. I think it was a couple of years earlier than that(?) when I tried using Kate, but it was so buggy and crashy as to be unusable.

Since I tried it pretty close to its initial release, I'm certain those problems were resolved. However, I developed work habits that didn't include it and so I still don't use it to this day.

> It was first copied by iTunes, then by Spotify, and now is considered a standard function.

You're forgetting Pandora somewhere in that timeline, probably between iTunes and Spotify.

That was my first introduction into the concept at least.

Kate was, beside Dolphin one of my earliest and most positively surprising discoveries on KDE.

Kate fulfills for me the role that Np++ had back in the windows days. I use it when I want to work file based and not project- or directory based.

If you need to work file based and not project or directory based then you should probably be using Kwrite, which literary is a stripped down version of Kate specifically for this purpose.

Which shows how far ahead KDE was even in 3.5 times with reusable embeddable components that were highly engineered. For example Konqueror has a long list of plugins including calling kwrite to render inside of it. The early kio tooling that predates fuse in having universal access through a single file viewer.

And it seems konqueror is the only browser today that can split a tab into multiple panes! I used this a lot in 3.5 times. It still works, just need to file another bug report for sane dnd behavior..

In what way is it neglected? It works, no need for pointless churn.

Also while it might not be known to users (why would it need to be), it is used in various KDE programs where it makes sense.

I found notepadqq to be a near drop-in replacement for my use of Notepad++ (mostly the visible line endings, find/replace extended characters like \n & \t). The interface is near-identical.

It hasn't been updated in a couple years but haven't run into any bugs in a year+ use.

That is a wild accusation. I need to install a nightly of Kate and give it another chance, if it's truly as good as you say. Np++ is starting to annoy me, with it's constant reopening of like 50 files every time it's started lol.

That's not a fix if you still want to be notified when files change under you but without a modal that prevents you from doing anything else (including closing the file it's nagging you about). Kate (or any other application using Kate's editor component) does this much better by displaying a non-modal notification bar at the top of the editor similar to how browsers have implemented non-modal notifications.

N++ can tail and follow files and colour code the output. Smashing!

Kate recently opens a default start page which I now find annoying. Kate also opens all previously opened files by default.

All of these things are defaults that are easy to override but changing defaults can be annoying, especially when you have been used the previous defaults for more than a decade ...

If you use Help > Find Action you can find stuff like that easier than hunting through the menus.

The actions for those are called "Remove Empty Lines" and "Remove Duplicate Lines"

No. No. No. You have it wrong, my friend. The entire thing, like systemd and wayland, is a glorified excuse to reinvent the wheel so that a fresh batch of wizards can continue the cycle.

Ah, this thought stopping argument again.

X11 is garbage which nobody wants to maintain, let alone develop. It's a very archaic design which is patched via extensions to sorta support some modern concepts which negate the network transparency anyway.

Both Wayland and systemd have a very wide developer consensus, because they finally provide a maintainable solution to their respective problems. The drama is constructed by a small minority of contrarians.

Wayland might have some developer consensus for the base protocol. Not so much for extensions to make it actually usable on a desktop. By the time it does it will be a patchwork as complex as X11 - it's already getting there with things like requiring PipeWire for simple things like capturing the screen.

When rewriting apps, people have a tendency to say: "well, Oldversion provides X. We could make a Newversion that provides X better, but that's hard so maybe X is actually bad? We should provide Y instead." Then they're confused when nobody with X needs wants to use Newversion.

It's OK to use X until Wayland has support for the missing features. I don't really care what I'm running. But it's clear that X is not in shape to see significant development (e.g. to support new needs) in the coming decades.

Kate is such an impressive editor, I’m glad that it’s being worked on and ported to other operating systems, and I didn’t know it had LSP support now! Good to see! If anything happens to BBEdit, Kate may be my next move

Now I am interested

BBEdit is the default editor for me.

I say this has someone who has used BBEdit since around 1997. And while for the last 15 years I have moved on to primarily using Sublime and then VSCode, I always configure them to be as close to BBEdit as possible, though I can never match BBEdit’s Single/Multi-File Search and Replace or Compare features.

Similarity dispute macOS being my favorite Desktop Environment, KDE has been my primary development DE for the past 2 years. So I really need to give Kate a chance.

I'm using KATE on Linux and BBEdit in macOS to develop in Golang mainly. Kate is snappy, robust and feature packed. It's my go to tool when I don't need a full-blown IDE.

> Even if that is a non-free platform, we can reach out to new users and developers that might later be then even interested to switch a full open platform.

KDE developers have always been great with their vision. I guess they will try to create OS Shell that sync users data between different OS? Their applications cover 99% of the casual users, with KDE Connect [0].

KDE Plasma has never clicked with me but KDE applications have always been my choice in a Linux system because of their responsiveness.

Dolphin for Windows[1] also exists but has some issues.

[0] https://apps.kde.org/kdeconnect/

[1] https://cdn.kde.org/ci-builds/system/dolphin/master/windows/

KDE applications still need a lot love on non X11/Wayland systems. Kate got some polish in the last years on Windows, the macOS version still needs more.

Probably like most people here you end up with a collection of tools, so glad Kate exists and really appreciate the high quality and amazing features. Years past you'd have to pay for things like UltraEdit and fight licenses, etc which are a nightmare if you cross boundaries with big companies.

I find myself using Kate, Geany and Notepad++ at different points in time for different tasks across my Windows/macOS/Linux machines.

Kate surprised me a few months ago, I had to write assembly for a fully custom processor whose ISA is not at all industry standard. Kate was able to do the syntax highlighting and with the right color theme and "double-click to highlight" it made the non-trivial changes I needed to make a LOT easier than anything else (VSCode/VSCodium included).

I logged in solely to say that Kate was the main reason I stuck with KDE as my desktop environment, back in the KDE 3 days. I switched to Mac some time ago but I still use Kate as my editor. I'm happy that it still exists.

Kate on MacOS is terrible. I've tried helping them fix the shortcuts which are all "wrong" (MacOS uses certain shortcuts that are unlike most Unix systems, but Kate doesn't actually use the right ones all Mac users expect so it's a nightmare until you manually override at least some of the shortcuts yourself). I tried using the build tool (suggested in the article) but building Kate was a nightmare even with that... I had to give up after a few days trying random things as suggested by people on the Kate chat (each build was taking hours, then finally failing with some completely inscrutable error).

Even though I really enjoyed using Kate on Linux, as a mainly Mac user I had to forget about it and keep using emacs for random stuff, and IntelliJ for Java/Kotlin/Groovy/Dart and anything else well supported by Jetbrains.

IIRC, you came around in the kate channel on the matrix. Unfortunately you gave up really close to getting the build successful :)

I did try to help as much as I could, but I am no Craft expert myself and we were transitioning to Qt6 at that time so things were more difficult than usual. Should be a lot easier now I think if you want to try.

That sounds more like switching to macos being terrible. If I am used to kate on linux, windows,..., then I expect it to just work if someone hands me a mac with kate.

If you additionally want mac-style shortcuts as an option that is fine, but defaults should be consistent.

There's no app that uses the same shortcuts in all OSs because that's just stupid (amongst other reasons, because the shortcuts would conflict with the OS's own shortcuts, just to mention one obvious reason). You need to default to the OS's defaults, and maybe have an option to try using another OS's defaults (like other IDEs do).

You keep making low effort comments that add nothing to the conversation. What are you trying to accomplish?

Have you actually tried using Kate on MacOS?

I have , and as I said, I even tried to help them use the correct defaults because it's completely unusable with the shortcuts they ship with.

Kate has been a really good replacement for stuff like VSCode or BBEdit, but it's still got some rough edges on macOS in my experience. I mostly use it on Linux, and the LSP support is actually pretty good. It's definitely a barebones experience without all of the plugin support other editors might have, but if you just need something for writing scripts or editing files it should fit the bill.

I love Kate's text edit component used in KWrite, KDevvelop (and Kile) but never really had much of a use for Kate itself. It's a weird step between a text editor and an IDE.

Love Kate! Given I _had_ to use Windows on my last job, I promptly installed it. Need multicursor shenanigans, and the lovely search & replace. Had some trouble with the default theme however (flashbang everytime I opened it). But, a nightly build solved that.

The only problem I have with Kate these days is... its icon. It's been there for years now, and yet my mind still just stops for a noticeable bunch of milliseconds whenever it has to recognize it. For some reason it looks like it represents some brand's useless mobile app rather than a proper utility and my mind somehow refuses to associate it with Kate.

Kate was my first code editor on Linux. Learned PHP and python on it.

I still have nostalgia with the pink syntax coloring it has (had?) for python!

Thanks a lot to all the contributors, sure had an impact on my life!

I wrote a part of the kernel (uitron) for Toshiba SSDs that went into macbooks around 2013 on kate. It was my first and favorite editor :D

I love the whole KDE toolchain and plasma as well. I donate monthly. It's so much more useful to me than the opinionated design of gnome.

For some reason I expected this article to be a horror story of bad behavior from the new community upon porting to other platforms (complaints about the port etc.), and how it wasn't worth the effort.

Glad to see that it's mostly a status update and a call for contributions.

I'd never heard of Kate and wondered if someone could explain what Kate's differentiator is versus other popular editors (e.g., Vim, Emacs, VSCode)? Is there something in particular that sets it apart or is it just a matter of taste?

My favourite Kate feature is sessions. Whatever your working on, you can save the session - including all open files and editor layouts, and restore it later on.

This is a killer feature in (n)vim as well. I had been trying out emacs + evil for some months at one point (was previously a vim user), but never got session restores working well at all. With vim it all restores, it's in the right spot, and even remote files opened with the scp:// syntax reopen perfectly. No plugins needed. I just use one session with the default filename of Session.vim, so a quick `nvim -S` gets me back in action and I don't mind restarting my editor much at all. With emacs I'd dread it and it was one of the worst parts of a session restart or reboot.

Highly recommend anyone see if their favorite editor can do sessions.

I suppose its a bit of several reasons: for sure taste, but also features, performance, etc. Its a GUI-based text editor, and not a big full-fledged IDE like VSCode. In my opinion, it pretty much follows the KDE philosophy (that I'll poorly paraphrase here) in that: using it and its features in their default settings will be totally fine to use as-is, but - like KDE Plasma for example - there are plenty of features that you can also unlock way beyond the default in order to allow for lots of customization and flexibility. It also is lightweight on resources considering its number of available features; closer to VIM, and lots lighter-weight than say VSCode. Many people would categorize Kate with other text editors like Geany, Notepad++, etc...and I agree with that categorization. Not sure if that helps! Then again, you could always check out some vidoes of Kate in use on youtube, or, if so inclined, perhaps try installing it and give it a run?

I've been using Kate for long time. I try other things but seem to gravitate back to Kate.

It's relatively resource efficient and fast, very full-featured, open source, and I can use it on different OSes and it's pretty much the same everywhere. Also it's GUI, and has a standard GUI UX.

I've never really had any problems with it at all until I started using it on ARM MacOS, where there were some weird bugs with filenames during saves (no corruption or anything, but would default to weird things and occasionally crash if the "wrong" filenames were used); but then the most recent major version seemed to fix all the problems.

I didn't know I could use it on MacOS. I recently started a new job where they have nothing but Mac, so I've been looking for a text editor that can do what Kate does. Everything seems to want to do 101 things before basic text editing, rather than just be a simple text editor with optional functionality, so I'm really excited to have Kate installed. I'm really hoping I don't run into too many issues as I've used Kate for years on my home & work setups and would really like to continue using it on mac now.

vim and emacs are TUI; Kate is a GUI app.

VSCode is a full-fledged IDE; Kate is much simpler. Think of it as comparable to TextEdit or notepad.exe, but with more features.

It's definitely trending in the VSCode direction, but VSCode is full of surveillance and corporate API clients, and Kate is not.

Come again? Most people install the windowed version of it today, but its history is very definitely TUI-based. All of the features you mentioned are things that have been added along the way as its container was able to support them.

Historically being TUI-centric doesn’t mean that it is not GUI today, right?

It supports all your fonts, font ligatures, varying font sizes inside the same buffer, renders images inside your buffers, all without relying on a terminal emulator or Sixel support. Sounds fundamentally not TUI to me.

Kate + LSP servers can get you really far as a pseudo-IDE. It's one of my favorite editors.

If you want to use it on other platforms, though, you have to dig around Gitlab build artifacts to grab recent successful builds. Looks like that may have changed.

Kate is the snappiest editor I have tried. This is just anecdata - the keystroke latency feels better than the other mainstream editors I use.

Kate is a surprisingly epic editor. It’s not my primary (vscode) but I use it often to just preview a plaintext file the same way I might use vim or sublime. Love the native rainbow columns in CSV.

Does anybody know why Kate wants to install pulseaudio on OpenBSD? This would be a perfect IDE.

   kate-23.08.4:libltdl-2.4.2p2: ok
   useradd: Warning: home directory `/var/run/pulse' doesn't exist, and -m was not specified
   kate-23.08.4:pulseaudio-17.0p0: ok
   kate-23.08.4:pcaudiolib-1.2: ok
   kate-23.08.4:espeak-1.51p2: ok
   kate-23.08.4:dotconf-1.3p0: ok
   kate-23.08.4:py3-xdg-0.28p2: ok
   kate-23.08.4:speech-dispatcher-0.11.5: ok

I've been using Kate on macOS and Windows for sometime and it's outstanding this is possible (a cross-platform KDE app). Kate of course on Linux kicks ass as well.

One stupid question: Is anyone aware of how to change the UI "theme" if you're running Kate on macOS or Windows? The 2D, flat icons really look horrible to me.

Why does the macOS binary needs to be 450MB if it's not an Electron app? My Qt app (also a text editor) is 140MB. And I can trim that quite a bit more.

Simple reason: Because the package is not optimized for that. It can be shrinked more, but that needs help. And I must confess, I rather spend my time on bug fixes than space optimizations.

Hey, Kate is awesome! Didn't mean to bring you down or anything. I myself got some trimming to do for my own apps. Keep up the good work.

BTW, any idea how Kate is so fast? Is there an architecture explanation somewhere? Is it based on Scintilla? I'm on a block editor[1] in Qt C++ and QML so that kind of information will be helpful.

[1] https://www.get-plume.com/

the architecture is really simple. The buffer contigously stores a list of "blocks". Each block contains a small number of actual text lines (usually 64-128). Thus if you edit a line, we only need to update the block containing the line. Once a block grows bigger than a certain number of lines, we split it into two.

If anyone is looking for a topic of a blog entry, I would like to see an analysis of the code/toolchain differences for projects like this that have patches for many different architectures and operating systems.

I really loved the overall design and functionality of kate back in the day, but I also really loved vim as my actual editor. kept hoping that the vimpart (vim embedded in kate as the editor component) would actually go somewhere, but it never did.

Kate is a lovely editor. I wrote about half of Designing Sound with Kate before switching to Emacs near the end (to better handle code integration). What I appreciate is the ability to have a pane of files open and very quickly cut and paste between them.

Even though I am a baptised and confirmed Emacs disciple, I still never find the buffer orientation quite maps to files the way I want. Kate hit that sweet-spot in a file based workflow,

It’s been a long time since I have used Kate. I see it is stealing design elements from VSCode just like JetBrains UIs decided to. That really disappoints me.

I really don’t get the point of doing so. If I wanted to use VSCode, I’d use VSCode rather than the knock off. Why not have a distinct visual identity for crying out loud.

because its not very easy to come up with new designs, at least for me. On the other hand if another tool provides a good and easy to understand UI, copying it makes sense. Kate still has a lot of its own things and ideas.

I see no issue in getting inspiration from other programs.

All projects do that, and I think that benefits the users.

Code has semantic highlighting via LSP, that is something KDevelop had before Code or Atom existed.

Same for the 'go to everywhere' that most likely was first in Sublime.

:) Perhaps even some features from Kate did inspire others, it is not that young.

The author wrote the post and already provided a different HN post title than the article title. That tl;dr (which isn't, it doesn't communicate a meaningful takeaway) could have been lightly edited into the HN submission title in the first place.

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