Kate is definitely my favorite text editor on Windows (on Linux I use it occasionally, along with featherpad, bluefish and vscodium).
I tend to only use it for relatively simple stuff (editing config files and keeping notes), but with what I consider one of its coolest features, Language Server Protocol support, you could just use it as a full IDE.
Hint for Windows users dissatisfied with its lackluster tooling: The KDE community provides Windows builds for lots of KDE apps.
I have been curious why is it that we have the editor war going (since the time immemorial) but good editors like Kate (or gedit, for that matter, or SciTE) have never been part of it.
KDE apps generally speaking are overlooked. For example Dolphin, Okular and Konsole are arguably the best of their class, but with little recognition as such.
For a long time I've been using a very minimal environment on Linux. That means no desktop environment, just a minimal window manager (it was OpenBox) and a simple terminal (rxvt-unicode). For more than 10 years I didn't even had a graphical file explorer installed on my system.
Approximately one year ago (maybe a bit more) I became curious of the Linux experience for "muggles". How could I recommend a system that I wasn't actually using? I spent a bit of time on the web to decide which desktop environment I would try and on the paper KDE looked the best.
So I did a clean install of Debian choosing KDE at install time (instead of… well, nothing, as I ever did before ^^). I'm really impressed with the quality of the environment and of the base apps. Except for the PIM suite, which looked really good on the paper but which was an unpleasant experience. I switch to Thunderbird and I'm very happy with it (before switching to KDE, I read my email in Emacs and has no proper calendar apps apart from a custom shell script which managed text files…).
I wouldn't recommend Debian with KDE. Debian is using an unsupported version of KDE and not one of the LTS version. Instead KDE Neon can be a good KDE experience for "muggles" (Ubuntu LTS + latest KDE stuff), because this is very much supported upstream.
I know, but I've been a Debian user for ever and I quite like the way Debian works. For sure I wouldn't mind more recent version of KDE being available in the backport repository.
Kate is one of these software that I follow with interest and would really like to use, but after years and years of Emacs I have a hard time in other text editors.
Are there any Kate users here? Have you used Kate for ever? If not what did you use before? What made you switch?
Vscode feels like kate done right, even in spite of being a webview app. With the arrival of all these extension-powered webview text editors, I don't see kate as becoming relevant beyond being bundled with KDE.
VSCode always looks and feels like a webapp that runs locally. Because that's exactly what it is. Give me menus, give me toolbars, give me rich visualisation. I don't care about excuses for not being to take advantage of the hardware, or about how fast it is for a webapp. I want a native executable.
> VSCode always looks and feels like a webapp that runs locally.
It really doesn't. It's snappy, and the only thing that feels out of place is the different keyboard shortcuts on macOS and windows/linux, but that's what you get by integrating with your platform.
> Give me menus, give me toolbars, give me rich visualisation. I don't care about excuses for not being to take advantage of the hardware, or about how fast it is for a webapp. I want a native executable.
Vscode gives you menus, and I don't see any technical limitation for vscode to provide native toolbars, except that usability-wise they are awful and a step-back from vscode's use of its spotlight-like command line interface.
And hey, truthfully all of these issues are nit-picking, and meanwhile kate was not used as an example of anything worth having. That says a lot.
I tend to only use it for relatively simple stuff (editing config files and keeping notes), but with what I consider one of its coolest features, Language Server Protocol support, you could just use it as a full IDE.
Hint for Windows users dissatisfied with its lackluster tooling: The KDE community provides Windows builds for lots of KDE apps.
Here's the entry point: https://community.kde.org/Windows
Here's the CI page: https://binary-factory.kde.org/view/Windows%2064-bit/