The Kate Handbook

The Kate Handbook

Anders Lund

Seth Rothberg

Dominik Haumann

Revision 3.4.0 (2009-09-13)

Copyright © 2000, 2001 Seth Rothberg

Copyright © 2002, 2003, 2005 Anders Lund

Copyright © 2005, 2009 Dominik Haumann

Kate is a programmer's text editor for KDE 4 and above.

This handbook documents Kate Version 3.4.0

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. The Fundamentals

Starting Kate

From the Menu
From the Command Line
Drag and Drop

Working with Kate

Quick Start
Shortcuts

Using Sessions

Restoring old style Kate behavior

Getting Help

With Kate
With Your Text Files

3. Working With the Kate MDI

The Main Window

The Editor area

The Documents List

The Filesystem Browser

The Built in Terminal Emulator

External Tools

4. Working with the Kate editor

Navigating in the Text

Working with the Selection

Using Block Selection
Using Overwrite Selection
Using Persistent Selection

Copying and Pasting Text

Finding and Replacing Text

The Search and Replace Bars
Finding Text
Replacing Text

Using Bookmarks

Automatically Wrapping text

Using automatic indenting

5. Working with Plug-ins

6. Advanced Editing Tools

Comment/Uncomment

The Editor Component Command Line

Standard Command Line Commands

Using Code Folding

Extending Kate with Scripts

Indentation Scripts
Command Line Scripts
Scripting API

7. Menu Entries

The File Menu
The Edit Menu
The Document Menu
The View menu
The Bookmarks Menu
The Tools Menu
The Sessions Menu
The Settings Menu
The Window Menu
The Help Menu

8. Configuring Kate

The Main Configuration Dialog

The Kate Application Configuration

The General Page
The Sessions Page
The Document List Page
The Plugins Page
The File Selector Page
The Terminal Page
External Tools

The Editor Component Configuration

Appearance
Fonts & Colors
Editing
Open & Save
Shortcuts
Extensions

Configuring With Document Variables

How Kate uses Variables

9. Credits and License

A. Working with Syntax Highlighting

The Kate Syntax Highlight System

How it Works
Rules
Context Styles and Keywords
Default Styles

The Highlight Definition XML Format

Overview
The Sections in Detail
Available Default Styles

Highlight Detection Rules

The Rules in Detail
Tips & Tricks

B. Regular Expressions

Introduction

Escaping characters
Character Classes and abbreviations
Alternatives: matching “one of”
Sub Patterns
Characters with a special meaning inside patterns

Quantifiers

Greed
In context examples

C. Installation

List of Examples

6.1. char examples
6.2. Replacing text in the current line
6.3. Replacing text in the whole file
6.4. A More Advanced Example

Introduction