We conclude our whimsical jaunt down text editor lane with a look at the KDE take on that always-necessary tool - the text editor. The KDE version is called Kate. Kate takes a different approach to the simplicity most of these tools take.

Kate is a multi-document editor that grew from a rewritten version of the KWrite editing widget of the KDE desktop. It's runnable on both Gnome and KDE desktops. Kate's feature set goes above and beyond.

Kate is the KDE Advanced Text Editor, and it does a great job for editing any type of text files, like Bash or Perl scripts, or C/C++ sources.

There are many applications out there that provide project-based web development tools and very feature-rich interfaces, but sometimes all you really need is a good text editor. For those times, there are few editors that can stand up to the KDE powerhouse called Kate.

Linux users have more text editors, IDEs, and command-line tools than a programmer can shake a stick at. If you're looking for a good programming text editor, we recommend Kate. It's super easy to get started with, but is quite powerful and has lots of great plugins to beef it up.

In the last two articles (part 1, part 2), I looked at getting started with Kate, and then at some of the more advanced features and configuration options. This final article covers features that you may find useful if you regularly write code or markup.

In my last article I introduced you to Gedit (see “Gedit: No more text-based editor for you!“) and, as promised, this time around we will examine the KDE equivalent…Kate.

The latest news about Kate comes from a posting by Dominik Haumann on the KDE website based on code-commits to Kate’s source code at a recent developer sprint in Vienna, Austria.

I just marked the Vi input mode (”V.I.M.”?) for the Kate kpart as done in the feature plan for KDE 4.2. It feels a bit weird to mark it as done, though, as there are tonnes of things I want to implement after KDE 4.2.