this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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I genuinely do a lot of coding in Kate, the standard KDE editor. It's enough to do a lot of things, has highlighting, and is more than enough when you just need a quick fix.
I am also still using nano when editing stuff in the terminal. Please, don't judge me.
To be fair, Kate isn't just a text editor, it actually is an IDE. The text editor version would be kwrite, which would be horrible to program in.
Wow, you're right of course. I completely forgot kwrite still existed, tbh.
Kwrite doesnt really exist on its own anymore. Its a slimmed down gui for kate now.
Oh wow you're right, it's basically just kate without some of the toolbars now. Hadn't used plain kwrite in a while.
We're almost like coding siblings lol
Yep, I came here to say that Kate is really nice. Even though I'm an emacs user and won't use it.
Nano, on the other hand, can't do almost anything, so I can't recommend that people make heavy use of it. It's ok for random small edits, but that's it. (By the way, YSK that you can set your terminal to use Kate as the default editor by setting the $EDITOR variable.)
KWrite is the standard text editor. Kate is the advanced one. The name actually literally stands for "KDE Advanced Text Editor"
I'm not aware of distros preinstalling KWrite, though...?
Huh, I did not know that any didn't. I just tried a bunch, and here is a quick breakdown of what was preinstalled on each:
Well, I can throw in another for free:
But yeah, interesting list. These days, KWrite is basically just Kate with different configuration, if I understand correctly, so it always feels like you might as well go with Kate. In my opinion, KWrite is also not particularly easier to use, since basic editing works the same, but I guess, that can be disagreed on.
I do like that Kate is pre-installed. Imagine Windows, but rather than notepad.exe, you get Notepad++ out of the box. Now imagine that to also be a whole lot better and then that's what it feels like to have Kate on fresh installations.
You can just start coding something right away, without it being necessary to install a different editor.
Geany is a nice GUI option. It's a bit more capable but still lean.
It's probably time for me to re-evaluate the host of coding editors out there. For the most part I just use good text editors. Though I do love Spyder, I only use it for a certain subset of tasks.
Me too. I'm still not sure what the problem is and I'm kind of afraid to ask.
I do have the plugin for multi-line editing set up, I guess.
All the cool kids use vim, so using nano makes you uncool, I guess. But I use Mint, so I'm uncool anyway.