I like simple editors and use Kate a lot. It’s like Kdevelop, but without all the additional baggage. It does syntax highlighting and indentation just fine, and it has code folding and can comment and uncomment entire text blocks. If an editor has all of that, it’s already making me very happy.
I was curious to see what will change with Kate in KDE 4, so I installed the KDE 4 version today on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), since it’s nicely packaged there. The screenshot above is from that version. Just wow. Text display is crisp and look at those code folding depth indicators (the gradually greener line on the side). When I took the screenshot, I was hovering my mouse over the greenest part, which highlights the block at this depth. The triangles let you fold code, of course.
Beautiful, isn’t it? And they must have done something to text rendering in Qt4, because the text elsewhere in the window looks sharp enough to cut entire horses in half. I can’t wait for KDE 4.1: maybe that’ll be a reason to switch the whole desktop like Shane is currently trying. The least I will do is switch to the KDE 4 version of Kate already 🙂