In computing

Computing

Computing is usually defined as the activity of using and improving computer hardware and software. It is the computer-specific part of information technology...

, Kate is a text editor

Text editor

A text editor is a type of program used for editing plain text files.Text editors are often provided with operating systems or software development packages, and can be used to change configuration files and programming language source code....

 by KDE

KDE

KDE is an international free software community producing an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X systems...

. The name Kate is an acronym for KDE Advanced Text Editor.

History

Kate has been part of KDE Software Compilation

KDE Software Compilation

The KDE Software Compilation is a desktop environment and an associated range of KDE Applications produced by KDE. Prior to version 4.4, released in February 2010, the Software Compilation was known as KDE, which used to stand for K Desktop Environment until November 2009...

 since release 2.2 in 2001. Because of the KParts technology, it is possible to embed Kate as an editing component in other KDE applications. The integrated development environment

Integrated development environment

An integrated development environment is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development...

 KDevelop

KDevelop

KDevelop is a free software integrated development environment for the KDE Platform on Unix-like computer operating systems. KDevelop includes no compiler. Instead, it uses an external compiler such as gcc to produce executable code....

, the web development environment Quanta Plus

Quanta Plus

Quanta Plus, originally called Quanta, is a web Integrated development environment for HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, PHP and any other XML-based languages or scripting languages. It is part of KDE, a Linux desktop environment, released in the Kdewebdev package...

, and the LaTeX front-end Kile

Kile

Kile is a TeX/LaTeX editor to edit TeX/LaTeX source code. It runs on Unix-like systems including Mac OS X and Linux with the Qt libraries installed.- Name :...

 are three of the major KDE applications making use of Kate as an editing component.

Features

Kate is a full-featured programmer's editor with syntax highlighting for over 200 filetypes. The syntax highlighting is extendable via XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

 files and can also specify code folding

Code folding

Code folding is a feature of some text editors, source code editors and IDEs that allows the user to selectively hide and display sections of a currently-edited file as a part of routine edit operations...

 rules. It has support for search and replace using regular expression

Regular expression

In computing, a regular expression provides a concise and flexible means for "matching" strings of text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters. Abbreviations for "regular expression" include "regex" and "regexp"...

s and supports auto-detection of file encodings. Supported encodings include UTF-8

UTF-8

UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...

, UTF-16, ISO-8859-1 and ASCII

ASCII

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...

.

Kate can be used as a modal

Mode (computer interface)

In user interface design, a mode is a distinct setting within a computer program or any physical machine interface, in which the same user input will produce perceived different results than it would in other settings....

 text editor by using its vi input mode
which emulates the vi

Vi

vi is a screen-oriented text editor originally created for the Unix operating system. The portable subset of the behavior of vi and programs based on it, and the ex editor language supported within these programs, is described by the Single Unix Specification and POSIX.The original code for vi...

 editor.

By using sessions, one can customize Kate for different projects. When using sessions, the list of open files, the list of enabled plug-ins and the window configuration are saved, allowing Kate to be customized for a given project.

KDE integration

Being a KDE application, Kate can transparently open and save files over all protocols supported by KIO

KIO

KIO is part of the KDE architecture. It provides access to files, web sites and other resources through a single consistent API. Applications, such as Konqueror which are written using this framework can operate on files stored on remote servers in exactly the same way as they operate on those...

. This includes HTTP, FTP, SSH

Secure Shell

Secure Shell is a network protocol for secure data communication, remote shell services or command execution and other secure network services between two networked computers that it connects via a secure channel over an insecure network: a server and a client...

, SMB

SMB

SMB may refer to:In People:* Sir Matt Busby , Scottish football managerIn Technology:* System Management Bus, a PC communication bus* SMB connector, SubMiniature version B connectors for radio-frequency circuits...

 and WebDAV

WebDAV

Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning is a set of methods based on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol that facilitates collaboration between users in editing and managing documents and files stored on World Wide Web servers...

.

Kate is built using the KPart technology and the Kate application is just a graphical shell around the editor component, referred to as katepart. This KPart component is embedded by other KDE programs as well. The Kate application uses the Konsole

Konsole

Konsole is a free terminal emulator which is part of KDE Software Compilation. Konsole was originally written by Lars Doelle.The KDE applications Konqueror, Krusader, Kate, Konversation, Dolphin and KDevelop use Konsole to provide embedded terminal functionality.- Features :* Tabbed terminals...

 kpart to get an embedded terminal.

Plugins and scripting

Kate can be extended through plugins written in C++ and scripts written in QtScript. Functionality implemented as plugins includes file browsers, ctags

Ctags

Ctags is a program that generates an index file of names found in source and header files of various programming languages.Depending on the language,functions,variables,class members,macros and so onmay be indexed....

support and functionality for building software projects and quickly jumping to compilation errors.

External links

• Official website
• [irc://irc.freenode.net/kate #kate] on freenode