# Kate Kate (short for "Kate Advanced Text Editor") is the programmer's text editor of the KDE project. It's free and [[Open Source]] (LGPL/GPL), and it runs on [[Linux]], Windows (in the Microsoft Store since 2019) and macOS. The tagline on the website is "Get an Edge in Editing". It sits between a plain editor and a full IDE. Kate is a native Qt application, so it starts fast, yet it ships most of what you'd install as extensions in [[Visual Studio Code (VSCode)]]: a [[Language Server Protocol (LSP)]] client (autocompletion, go-to-definition), a debugger frontend (GDB and DAP), an embedded Konsole terminal, [[Git]] integration, projects, a build plugin and even a SQL plugin. Syntax highlighting covers more than 400 languages. You also get multiple cursors and selections, rectangular block selection, on-the-fly spell checking, split views, sessions, project-wide search and replace, and scripting. The Vi input mode means [[Vim]] or [[Neovim]] users keep their motions. The editing component is the KTextEditor framework, shared with KWrite and KDevelop, so a fix there lands in all three. The project is more than 20 years old (the kwrite-devel mailing list started in February 2001). Christoph Cullmann has maintained it for most of that time, with Dominik Haumann as a core developer. The port to Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 landed in 2023-2024. Qt 6.7 brought OpenType font features, so programming ligatures work. A Formatting plugin arrived in 2024, the project passed 1,500 accepted merge requests by December of that year, and releases now follow the KDE Gear versioning (25.04 and so on). Kate doesn't need the Plasma desktop. Any Linux desktop that runs Qt apps will do, tiling window managers included. ## References - https://kate-editor.org/ - https://kate-editor.org/post/ ## Related - [[Language Server Protocol (LSP)]] - [[Visual Studio Code (VSCode)]] - [[Neovim]] - [[Vim]] - [[Linux]] - [[Git]] - [[Open Source]]