If you need a GUI editor, Zed is pretty great. But I'm a Helix editor user in the terminal.

Would installing a HTML LSP for Kate solve your closing tag issue if you haven't already?

I've used it before when trying out IDEs. Its really good, its a no bullshit solution to VS code. If you've used sublime text, Kate is similar to that as it is quite minimal.

On a spectrum of minimalisim and memory consumption, you have emacs, Vi, VIM at the lower end of the curve. This is for users to customize or to use the smallest memory footprint, than in the median its kdevelop/Kate sublime, and VS codium, and on the far end of spectrum you have your bloat software VS code and ItelliJ idea.

Personally I'm using Vim for my projects in C, C++, Python, octave scripts, sh scripts, and markdown. I like to keep my memory footprint small which is why I use a text editor over a full blown IDE. I have used amd's Vitis IDE for embedded systems (which is just a fork of VS codium).

Yes, Kate is a great editor. My husband likes it very much, he writes his hobby AtariST/Amstrad code in it (some modern C too). He dislikes things like vim, he likes gui editors (despite being a linux guy since the '90s). Same for me.

I mean, yeah, it is a decent editor. It's not the most feature-rich editor to ever exist and it doesn't really have a plugin ecosystem to make up for it. But it's relatively lightweight and thanks to LSP, the programming language support plays in a similar league to full-fledged IDEs.

Sure, yes, auto-completion/-closing brackets, smart indendation, are standard features of most code editors. Kate also has a LSP plugin and external programs are easily setup. And features like ctrl+b to mark a line, i found no good extension in vscodium.

This from kwrite.

I went Sublime -> VSCode -> Kate and I'm definitely not going backwards.

On Linux I tried the fltapak versio of VSCodium. It was very slow to load and constantly crashed. At work I'm forced to use Windows, but I still prefer Kate over VSCode. I might be biased by my hatred for Microsoft, but Kate works great for me.

I'm open to trying other open source editors/ides. From this post it sounds like genie might be cool. But I'm generally happy with Kate so unlikely to try something else.

Sometimes I use neovim, sometimes I use Emacs (so I can make both camps equally angry). Why Kate, not one of the heavyweights? Or Helix, if you want something modern and low hassle?

Code editor? Eh, if you don't like VSCode or any of the other ones.

Text editor? Yes, definitely! IMO it's better than vim and Notepad++ if you're coming from Windows.

It's alright. I actually was on a similar, albeit just a month long, phase when I switched to KDE. I used VSCodium before and switched (back?) to VSCode after two weeks.

The main reason was extension support. I didn't notice how much I leaned on those before switching. For example taking notes became more cumbersome and journaling in Typst became impossible (from the editor at least). I have been expecting a lot from my IDE that aren't really its responsibilities.

Actually programming was a perfectly fine experience so I kept trying to make it work. But at some point a project required me to run dev containers. I had VSCode installed for that anyway so that was the end of it. Though by now I have basically completely switched to Neovim.

I recommend trying out Neovim (Maybe Emacs but I personally never tried it). Or if you prefer a GUI, or don't want to learn their system, definitely give VSCodium or VSCode a shot. Those four have a much greater assortment of plugins so it'll be a lot easier to get your editor to behave how you want it to. Though this comes at the cost of a higher memory and cpu footprint.

Man we’re the same person lol I too use geany for basically everything and tried out Kate because it felt more feature complete but it just isn’t. There is nothing I can do on Kate that I can’t do in Geany that is relevant to me. Mostly Lua programming and markdown editing.

I’d say just make a theme that fits the KDE style and use some breeze icons in the editor to make it feel more like it belongs and use what works and is comfortable.

I still use gnome and so I made a gnome builder editor theme and made the whole editor look like gnome builder and it works wonderfully. I bet the same is possible for kde.

I had been using Kate for working on C++, Objective-C, and python projects both on macOS and Linux. I didn't manage to get C++ debugging or the LSP integrations working, as it isn't easy to figure out how to setup it up on different platforms.

In the last 6 months, I have switched over to Gram, and it is trivial to configure the LSPs and debuggers, and have since stopped using Kate.

I use Geany too, but I've always read a lot of good things about Kate.

It's cool to see so many Geany users. How is it for an IDE? I use Gram atm and am quite happy, but it's not really a fully-fledged IDE. I used to like JetBrains products but they've enshittified a lot, have always been slow memory hogs, and aren't fully FOSS. Something like the power of JetBrains IDEs when they were good, but running natively instead of in the JVM, and fully FOSS, would be my ideal.