In my last article I introduced you to Gedit (see “Gedit: No more text-based editor for you!“) and, as promised, this time around we will examine the KDE equivalent…Kate.

The focus of this 10 page mini-course is to provide a foundation for using basic text editors. At some time everyone who uses Linux will need a text editor. One of the most important reasons for learning vi is that it is loaded on every Linux distro by default whereas others like nano or emacs are not. So whatever text editor you choose be sure you load it and use it before you need it.

«I participated at CONSOL 2009 and had the opportunity to give 4 talks this time and meet with "the software libre community"...»

I just marked the Vi input mode (”V.I.M.”?) for the Kate kpart as done in the feature plan for KDE 4.2. It feels a bit weird to mark it as done, though, as there are tonnes of things I want to implement after KDE 4.2.

"Straight to the point: since mid September I've been using Emacs, trying to evaluate whether I was willing to switch from Vim to it. Yup, that's true, me (user of Vim since the day I've started using GNU/Linux 10 years ago, (not so) active maintainer in Debian of vim and related packages, author of some popular Vim extensions and of vim-addon-manager) it's considering switching to Emacs.

When I first started Linux, I fired up “Text Editor” and almost collapsed. What the hell was that? I like many Windows and Mac users, hit this bird on the first flyover of Linux. Now I could have used Open Office but I’m an old dog, and if I’m gonna be taught new tricks they better be damn good ones.