I have such nice memories with Kate and our computer science courses back in 1998-2001 as we studied fun things like that new Java language that was taking the world by storm. There were rumors that Microsoft was working on a Java competitor codenamed Cool¹ but for now, Sun Microsystems was suddenly hot again in a resurgence, even in circles they had rarely been seen before. So, in 2001, Kate was announced and KDE 2 was enrichened with that nice and powerful IDE! And yet I recall it feeling quite performant and not that heavy for how much it could do. I still think it's a neat balance between performance and utility.

¹ And indeed, in 1999, Anders Hejlsberg formed a team to create such a language ("C-like Object Oriented Language") but due to copyright reasons, it was later renamed to C#.

I don't do much work in Kate anymore, but in the last 10 years or so it has become my virtual note pad. There is almost always an instance running with a dozen or so unsaved documents open. The one feature I use the most is the ability to pipe out to a shell command, you can string pipes inside that too. I do this for quick data manipulation.

I mainly use Kdevelop, but it does use the same backend as Kate!

Both are incredible, and allow one to easily hook up scripts and tools to the GUI or keybindings. It's great to be able to use whatever you have in your machine instead of downloading plugins to do the same thing and relying on the author's opinionated defaults.

Really sane development programs, I was always thrown off by how other hackable editors like Emacs and Vim. They're great! But all the effort needed to use them means that I'm not making things happen.

The features page might be underselling Kate, but it's really powerful.

How do you write scripts and tools for Kate without learning about the Kate scripting environment?

Isn't that the same as Vim or Emacs? You gotta learn the how to write for it

You can just use the GUI to save a call for a script or a set of commands. Those will be available in the GUI afterwards as well.

Did not know Kate was available outside KDE.

Looks interesting, maybe it can replace vscode for some light editing?

Yes and beyond: You can also use it for full software development. After all that's what it's intended to do. It's no accident 6 out of 8 screenshots show source code. I know/knew some pretty skilled devs using it for their defacto-IDE ;-)

Does it work as a somewhat competent IDE without needing a bunch of plugins?

This is honestly my main complaint about vscode. Can't for example work with Go projects without installing tons of external tools, some of which written by random devs outside Microsoft and Google.

There are a bunch of plugins and you likely will use some for development work, but they are ~all first-party. So no need to worry about them not keeping up with plugin interface changes, being mutually incompatible and such.

First hit using Google: https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/cokcuw/the_kate_edi... LSP support for Go was introduced 4y ago. There were some discussions regarding go-langserver vs gopls, but that could be dated (Christoph & contributors are quite active).

Personally, I'm an e-vi-l person and never worked on Go projects, so I can't tell you from experience. Also I don't know your requirements. Maybe just give it a shot? After all, its FOSS, so the only investment is your time ;)

It's the one that I use for programming, with language server plugin.

Never liked IDEs, mostly for their always awkward build system integration. In Kate, I can just edit and (with LSP) navigate, for the rest I have the command line.

Kate, such a nice editor. I used it for a while, until they lost the python-customizing because of KDE4(?). It was more of a hidden and unofficial feature, but you could back then add new Widgets and functions with PyQt, which made it a more hacky variation of what VS Code is today. Together with the pretty good editor-component was this a very nice and productive combo. I which a good editor with python-support on that level would be still around..

I used Kate before for C++ development, there isn't much about it, it just gets the job done, I don't rely on the editor/IDE to do anything other than edit files so any editor works for me. The thing is, it isn't as eye-candy as VSCode is/can be, I know that technically this isn't a crucial feature but UI does affect my software choices. Also, does Kate look the same on all supported platforms?

I wouldn't classify line numbers as an "advanced editor feature" :D but all in all doesn't look bad

Kate is such a nice editor. Very slept on.

I always avoided Kate, because when I tried it in its early releases, it was unusably buggy and crashed constantly for me. As a result, I picked up the habit of using other text editors and just never gave Kate another try.

But maybe I should...

I used to use Kate before Moore's law caught up and people discovered optimization again, now I use VS code.

Still a really nice editor!

Good editor but not as good as neovim, as usual