Christoph’s Blog

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kate isn’t just a NOTEPAD.EXE for KDE

with 3 comments

I’ve been a VIM lover for at least a decade. Nothing beats it at doing complex text editing. Surely it’s not intuitive (although I frequently claim that VI stands for “very intuitive”) but no other text editor can so quickly repeat the last action or reformat a paragraph or insert text at a certain column in every line etc. I am very fast with it and happily ranted at IDEs like SPE, Eric or WingIDE for having such a bad text editor. They were more like a NOTEPAD.EXE that allowed you to navigate with the cursor keys and insert text where you are. But I have to admit that IDEs have a lot of advantages like code completion (vim doesn’t understand Python - not even with omni-completion), templates or dealing with your repository software.

I love cryptic hardcore tools because once I understand them I’m very fast in accomplishing tasks. But even after a decade of using VIM I don’t really understand its configuration or some more advanced features properly. Recently I tried to tell a Python file that I simply like the textwidth to be 100 by adding

:vim:set tw=100:

at the end of the file. No idea why that didn’t work. The command worked well when typed manually.

In addition many basic features like editing multiple files at the same time became a chaos quickly. Multiple buffers? Nah. Tabs are nice but after a certain amount of open files you have to use the arrows to find your file again. Syntax coloring is nice but customizing it is a pain. VIM is great for editing single files and I will always use it to work on DNS zone files for example. But since I develop Pylons (a Python web framework) applications I have to deal with many open files and complex Python code. I tried “pida” which is very promising but is still lacking. For example it doesn’t remember the window panes as I want to have them arranged and find myself moving around things every time I start it up.

I wouldn’t have expected to hear myself saying that vim is not good for all tasks. I had always condemned editors for not being vim and wasn’t open for all the features that I was missing out. Currently I’m trying out “kate”. I had expected it to be a stupid text editor like NOTEPAD.EXE or joe but although it looks similar it is very powerful. Some things I like about it:

  • Handles multiple open files in sessions gracefully (even shows which files have changed)
  • Shows indentation levels in source code (no more guessing where a Python function ends)
  • Text completion (no worse than what vim can do)
  • Closing brackets automatically
  • Split views
  • Syntax highlighting for all types of text files I care about
  • Proper Python indentation handling (vim doesn’t even add an indentation level after a line ending with “:” unless you use dirty tricks)
  • Code folding
  • Snippets (finally I don’t have to copy/paste templates from my knotes any more)
  • Commenting/Uncommenting of lines without :s/^/#/ magic

Kate doesn’t do all things that vim can. But the common tasks are made simpler and more comfortable. No idea if it will be my new editor. But it appears like other text editors besides vim are also worth being tried.

Written by Christoph Haas

December 2nd, 2007 at 3:47 pm

Posted in Find, Programming, Pylons

3 Responses to 'kate isn’t just a NOTEPAD.EXE for KDE'

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  1. Definitely..

    But you can use the best of both worlds.

    My favorite editor ist between an good default editor like gedit or kate, and an feature-packed IDE like Eclipse + Languages Plugin-IDEs (for example PyDev and Aptana).

    It’s OpenKomodo, the soon completely opensourced Komodo IDE - http://www.openkomodo.org.

    And, it also hast a vi emulation mode. Have a look in the preferences.

    Also it is perfect for Pylons web development - and I am not alone with my opinion, see the screencasts here: http://www.pylonscasts.com/ :)

    Altough this guy just uses a little part of the convinience functions - especially for the web - which it provides (but hides it a little but too be as intuitive as it could).

    Markus

    6 Jun 08 at 11:14 pm

  2. I haven’t updated my post but I’ve really been using Komodo Edit for months already. The abbrevations are great, syntax highlighting works well (except for Mako templates where it just fails and complains about things that are not an issue - even the Mako syntax addon doesn’t work properly), code completion is great and its customizable. If the whole IDE becomes open source that would be terrific.

    Chris

    7 Jun 08 at 7:35 am

  3. You should check out http://hamberg.no/erlend/?p=51 this. :-)

    Still not mature, but it’s getting there fast. :-)

    Erlend

    7 Aug 08 at 11:46 am

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