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Kate Editor is Getting Four New Awesome Features

KDE's feature-packed text editor is getting better and more useful!

Kate Editor is a constantly evolving and powerful open-source text editor that acts as a viable alternative to Microsoft's Visual Studio Code application.

It is available for Linux, Windows, and macOS.

The code editor received a significant upgrade in 2021 potentially making it KDE's answer to Microsoft's offering.

Kate Editor Set to Become KDE’s Answer to Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code
KDE has revealed some details on the upcoming 21.04 release of their Kate text editor, or KDE Advanced Text Editor. With this release comes a huge range of new features, such as a new HUD style command palette and improved search in files. To the Visual Studio Code users

With the upcoming Kate and KWrite 22.12 release, they aim to add a number of much-needed features.

Let's take a brief look at what we can expect from Kate.

🆕 Kate Editor: New Feature Additions

If you have been reading Nate's blog for KDE improvements, you probably know all about the upgrades coming to KDE Plasma and the applications.

However, some exciting additions are coming to Kate 22.12 that I wanted to highlight:

  • Support for Qt Widgets
  • Updated Welcome Page
  • Git Diff Viewer
  • Configuration Tab
  • Clipboard History
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Welcome Page

kate 22.12 welcome page
Image Credits: KDE

Like many other KDE apps, Kate will now show a welcome page that will greet users with a welcome screen and include options like creating or opening a file, starting a new session, viewing recent documents, and more.

For users who might not like this, an option will be provided on the welcome page to disable this behavior for a new window.

Git Diff Viewer

kate 22.12 git diff support
Image Credits: KDE

Kate will finally get support for viewing git-diff; users will be able to compare their code to check for differences and find those pesky bugs that are causing their application not to run correctly.

Users will also be able to choose from a variety of views, such as unified, side-by-side, and raw.

New Clipboard History Paste Dialog

kate 22.12 clipboard history
Image Credits: KDE

A new dialog has been added to Kate, showing users a list of previous clipboard content while pasting.

This can be helpful if you are juggling between multiple lines of code and don't want to lose track of the essential bits.

Configuration Tab

kate 22.12 configuration tab
Image Credits: KDE

Kate will also feature a configuration tab that lets users change significant settings and a search bar to quickly find specific settings.

🛠️ Other Changes and Improvements

Some other notable improvements to be featured on Kate 22.12 are:

  • Optimized Status Bar
  • Improvements to the Build Plugin
  • Moveable Sidebar Buttons
  • Improvements to Window Handling

Kate is shaping to be a suitable alternative to Microsoft's Visual Studio Code and has come a long way since its major revamp in 2021.

In Kate's official blog post, you can learn more about these changes and watch them in action.

💬 Are you looking forward to the release of Kate 22.12? Or do you prefer VS Code?


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