How do you use kate? Tips/Tricks/Workflow

Question

We all seen a bunch of these? Mostly for IDE's but also for vim and emacs.

Kate is (only) a text editor (an awesome one) but it has a ton of options plus a number of plugins, so its hard to know all of it well. How do use the Kate text editor? Please share your workflow and help me and others learn some of the cool tricks you use.

I'll start I use the built in terminal a lot opening files quickly, and using it as an enhanced haskell repl with ghci (since ghci doesn't allow you all to just put in all kinds of haskell code). Also use split views to quickly compare files (especially different versions of the same file). Also the auto-complete maybe simple(more use for saving typing time then remembering functions) but it works really well for that. Also if You highlight something and hit a start [/{/( it puts it in between brackets rather then replacing it with a bracket(why the hell do a lot of IDEs not have this feature).

Answer 1

Well for this question a fitting answer is really just a stylistic guide.

For example, if I would use Kate I would start with setting up a nice dark color scheme and Droid Mono as the main font of the editor. So bad that there're no pre-made color schemes in Kate. (This is quite a no-brainer feature.)

I wasn't really able to find a place where you can find information about the available plugins. It's quite hard to recommend anything this way. If you could get plugins for the version control systems you use it would be nice. (I find this feature quite useful in IDEs like NetBeans.)

I'm quite sure that the Vi input mode could be useful to some of us. (Even if I don't understand why would anyone use Kate instead of gVim for example.)

I'm reading the tip of the day. It says that you can

• export the syntax-highlighted code to HTML
• use sed-like replace expressions using the "Command Line"

That was all the tips & tricks I was able to think of.

Answer 2

I keep my text editor, file browser and shell panes visible at all times. So I can work with multiple files and use my make/gcc from command line quickly