Can someone explain to me why one would use a GUI text editor like Kate above emacs/vim, apart from the looks?
I've never used Kate seriously, but I'm curious about what benefits it provides...
I've never used Kate seriously, but I'm curious about what benefits it provides...
2. Syntax highlighting & formatting is better because of support for multiple fonts & better control of color.
3. Integration with other graphical apps. Kate is used as a component inside of many other KDE tools, so when you edit a file, the behavior is consistent and the key bindings are consistent.
4. Better integration with the desktop environment (in this case KDE). For example, I can open a file on a remote machine from the file open dialog. The file open dialog isis keychain aware, and can connect to any host that the desktop environment can (with KDE, that is almost anything that has file-like objects and remote protocol). You can do some editor be able to open a message from an IMAP server like I'm browsing files on localhost.
Kate is more like a Notepad++ or TextWrangler on Mac. It's a solid editor, but not an Emacs, vim, or VSCode level.
Emacs has nothing to do with shell prompts. It's a GUI editor as well. Emacs philosophy goes against Unix. I e.g. never use the terminal mode. Otherwise, your points seem on-point.
The reasons both Emacs and Vim have a Qt version as well instead of purely relying on a terminal protocol are obvious:
- ability to have fonts of different sizes
- ability to listen to more complicated keyboard shortcuts
- cleaner ways of opening popups
- ability to combine multiple fonts
- support for more colors
The downside of such a more complex protocol is that it's more involved to tunnel it over a network and doing attaching to X11 is also quite a bit more complicated than doing it to a terminal program.
The main benefit is about choice, I keep a stack of text editors around just out of curiosity, because I like playing with software and editors and sometimes you find features you think are neat, and then go off to try and replicate them in your main editor or tool. Open source software is good at communicating ideas and text editors as a whole have really improved each other over the last three or four decades.
It's just a pleasure to use.
Kate is lightweight yet versatile; despite what the screenshots might suggest. This is due to the extremely well-done integration in KDE: for example, the file browser is (was?) really just the file browser konqueror from KDE, Kate has to do hardly anything for that, just "wrap" it. Same for syntax highlighting, terminal, snippets, keybindings, windows chrome, and so on. Kate is really mostly a neat wrapper around a lot of existing KDE parts and libs (and that is an achievement, I don't mean that negatively).
With Vim, I often say "Unix is my IDE", with Kate that could be translated to "the Desktop Environment is your IDE".
Im not particularly overawed with emacs or vim features. I've seen some people give breathless demos explaining how cool it was that they could do certain things and not felt especially impressed, especially given the learning curve. They seemed to be optimizing for things I don't need to optimize for.
There are some blind people who do use, and love, vim/Emacs, bit GUI editors which integrate with their OSes accessibility features are usually a better experience.
If you want an example, sometimes for errors vim prints something at the bottom, it's not clear to a screen reader if it should go read that, and why.
1. Selection and system clipboard integration. 2. Ability to quickly scroll to look something without moving the cursor, then return where I was by pressing an arrow key (one of the largest pain points of emacs for me). 3. Proportional fonts with proper text rendering, especially for notes.
I use 1 and 2 almost on a subconscious level, and it's hard for me to be productive in an editor which doesn't support these features. I'm sure, vim users can relate.
I would use this to edit HTML, CSS, and JS (and later PHP) on my FreeBSD servers which hosted my websites.
Once I learned revision control (hg mercurial) I largely stopped modifying files directly on the remote host so I had less of a need for an sftp client built into my text editor.
If it's set to "n" (for "normal mode") or "a" (for "all modes"), it pretty much does what you're mentioning: one can instantly move the cursor to a given spot; use the scroll wheel to scroll the document, and (via netrw or any other file explorer or side-bar plugin) double-click to open a different file.
If someone wanted good mouse support, I'm not sure it'd cut it. I prefer keyboard selection myself, but there are times mouse selection is faster, and I usually use not-vim for that.
I'm just faster doing things like cutting/pasting between multiple files, splitting screens, multi-line cursors, with a GUI text editor over vim.
No, I'm not interested in putting even more time into time/effort/space-in-my-memory/etc into learning vim's keyboard combos to effectively do this stuff.
They are all good enough for programming work and are nigh indistinguishable from each other unless you go deep.
Maybe unless it's Atom, but I think they had improved their performance over the years.
In Emacs you need to configure LSP, which is a non-trivial task.
I have no idea how Kate rates in that aspect, have never used it. Suprised to hear that it's still alive (but that doesn't mean negatively surprised).
I already beat you to it cuz I used my mouse lol (and I don't have unwanted line numbers and garbo whitespace in the pasted text, to boot).
Selecting a block of text is arguably faster in vim than with the mouse, and then just hit "y" to copy. It think its comparable to Kate+Mouse