Chapter 7. Configure KatePart

The editor will never display dots to indicate the presence of whitespace.

The editor will display dots to indicate the presence of extra whitespace at the end of lines.

The editor will always display dots to indicate the presence of whitespace.

If this is enabled, the range between the selected matching brackets will be highlighted.

When enabled, the editor will show a tooltip of the matching open bracket.

If enabled, moving on the brackets ({, [, ], },( or )) will quickly flash the matching bracket.

Displays the number of words and characters in the document and in the current selection in the status bar. This option is also available in the status bar context menu.

Displays the number of total lines in the document in the status bar. This option is also available in the status bar context menu.

When checked, editor wraps lines dynamically at the static word wrap position.

When checked, the editor does not take into account word boundaries when wrapping text lines.

If this option is checked, the current view will display marks for code folding, if code folding is available.

If checked, hovering over a folded region shows a preview of the folded text in a popup.

If this is checked, you will see an icon border on the left hand side. The icon border shows bookmark signs for instance.

If this is checked, you will see line numbers on the left hand side.

If this is checked, line modification markers will be visible. For more information, see the section called “Line Modification Indicators”.

If this option is checked the current view will show marks on the vertical scrollbar. These marks will for instance show bookmarks.

If this option is checked, and you hover the scrollbar with the mouse cursor a small text preview with several lines of the current document around the cursor position will be displayed. This allows you to quickly switch to another part of the document.

If this option is checked, every new view will show a minimap of the document on the vertical scrollbar.

For more information on the scrollbar minimap, see the section called “The Scrollbar Minimap”.

Adjusts the width of the scrollbar mini-map, defined in pixels.

Switch the scrollbar on, off or show the scrollbar only when needed. Click with the left mouse button on the blue rectangle to display the line number range of the document displayed on the screen. Keep the left mouse button pressed outside the blue rectangle to automatically scroll through the document.

Each new bookmark will be added to the bottom, independently from where it is placed in the document.

The bookmarks will be ordered by the line numbers they are placed at.

Turns static word wrap on or off.

If this option is checked, a vertical line will be drawn at the word wrap column as defined in the Settings → Configure Editor... in the Editing tab. Please note that the word wrap marker is only drawn if you use a fixed pitch font.

If the Wrap words at a fixed column option is selected this entry determines the length (in characters) at which the editor will automatically start a new line.

This option enables drag-and-drop of the selected text inside the editor window.

If this option is enabled and the text selection is empty, copy and cut action are performed for the line of text at the actual cursor position.

If this option is enabled and you paste some text in the editor window with the middle mouse button clicking, KatePart will not move the text cursor into the clicked position.

When selected, pressing the home key will cause the cursor to skip white space and go to the start of a line's text.

This option changes the behavior of the cursor when the user presses the PgUp or PgDn key. If unselected the text cursor will maintain its relative position within the visible text in KatePart as new text becomes visible as a result of the operation. So if the cursor is in the middle of the visible text when the operation occurs it will remain there (except when one reaches the beginning or end.) With this option selected, the first key press will cause the cursor to move to either the top or bottom of the visible text as a new page of text is displayed.

This option changes the behavior of the cursor when the user presses the Ctrl+Left arrow or Ctrl+Right arrow shortcut. If unselected the text cursor jumps over the full words. With this option selected, the cursor jumps break at camel case humps.

Sets the number of lines to maintain visible above and below the cursor when possible.

Selections will be overwritten by typed text and will be lost on cursor movement.

Selections will stay even after cursor movement and typing.

This option lets you scroll past the end of the document. This can be used to vertically centre the bottom of the document, or put it on top of the current view.

When selected, composed characters are removed with their diacritics instead of only removing the base character. This is useful for Indic locales.

When this is enabled the editor will insert tabulator characters when you press the Tab key or use automatic indentation.

When this is enabled the editor will insert a calculated number of spaces according to the position in the text and the tab-width setting when you press the Tab key or use automatic indentation.

When this is enabled, the editor will insert spaces as describe above when indenting or pressing Tab at the beginning of a line, but insert tabulators when the Tab key is pressed in the middle or end of a line.

This configures the number of spaces that are displayed in place of a tabulator character.

The indentation width is the number of spaces which is used to indent a line. If configured to indent using tabulators, a tabulator character is inserted if the indentation is divisible by the tab width.

If this option is disabled, changing the indentation level aligns a line to a multiple of the width specified in Indentation width.

If this option is selected, text pasted from the clipboard is indented. Triggering the Undo action removes the indentation.

If this option is selected, the Backspace key decreases the indentation level if the cursor is located in the leading blank space of a line.

If you want Tab to align the current line in the current code block like in Emacs, make Tab a shortcut to the action Format Indentation.

If enabled, a word completion box automatically pops up during typing showing a list of text entries to complete the current text under the cursor.

If enabled, the first auto completion item is always preselected so you can insert it with Enter. If you do not want such behavior, e.g. if you want pressing Enter to only insert a newline, then disable this item.

When selected, Vi commands will override KatePart's built-in commands. For example: Ctrl+R will redo, and override the standard action (showing the search and replace dialog).

if this is enabled, the current line always refers to line 0. Lines above and below increase the line number relatively.

This defines the standard encoding to use to open/save files, if not changed in the open/save dialog or by using a command line option.

Select an item from the drop down box, either to disable autodetection or use Universal to enable autodetection for all encodings. But as this may probably only detect utf-8/utf-16, selecting a region will use custom heuristics for better results. If neither the encoding chosen as standard above, nor the encoding specified in the open/save dialog, nor the encoding specified on command line match the content of the file, this detection will be run.

This defines the fallback encoding to try for opening files if neither the encoding chosen as standard above, nor the encoding specified in the open/ save dialog, nor the encoding specified on command line match the content of the file. Before this is used, an attempt will be made to determine the encoding to use by looking for a byte order mark at start of file: if one is found, the right unicode encoding will be chosen; otherwise encoding detection will run, if both fail fallback encoding will be tried.

Choose your preferred end of line mode for your active document. You have the choice between UNIX®, DOS/Windows® or Macintosh.

Check this if you want the editor to autodetect the end of line type. The first found end of line type will be used for the whole file.

The byte order mark is a special sequence at the beginning of unicode encoded documents. It helps editors to open text documents with the correct unicode encoding. For more information see Byte Order Mark.

Unfortunately, due to deficiencies in Qt™, KatePart experiences poor performance when working with extremely long lines. For that reason, KatePart will automatically wrap lines when they are longer than the number of characters specified here. To disable this, set this to 0.

The editor will automatically eliminate extra spaces at the ends of lines of text while saving the file. You can select Never to disable this functionality, On Modified Lines to do so only on lines that you have modified since you last saved the document, or In Entire Document to remove them unconditionally from the entire document.

The editor will automatically append a newline to the end of the file if one is not already present upon saving the file.

The editor will automatically save documents when you switch to something outside the editor, e.g., the terminal panel in Kate.

You can determine the autosave interval in seconds here. If the interval is 0, the document will not be autosaved after intervals.

Check this if you want backups of local files when saving.

Check this if you want backups of remote files when saving.

Enter the prefix to prepend to the backup file names.

Enter the suffix to add to the backup file names.

KatePart is able to recover (most) unsaved work in the case of a crash or power failure. A swap file (.<filename>.kate-swp) is created when a document is edited. If the user doesn’t save the changes and KatePart crashes, the swap file remains on the disk. When opening a file, KatePart checks if there is a swap file for the document and if it is, it asks the user whether he wants to recover the lost data or not. The user has the possibility to view the differences between the original file and the recovered one, too. The swap file is deleted after every save and on normal exit.

KatePart syncs the swap files on the disk every 15 seconds, but only if they have changed since the last sync. The user can disable the swap files syncing if he wants, by selecting Disable, but this can lead to more data loss.

When the swap file is enabled, it is possible to switch between two modes, namely Enabled, Store in Default Directory and Enabled, Store in Custom Directory.

By default, the swap files are saved in the same folder as the file. When Enabled, Store in Custom Directory is chosen for the swap file mode, swap files are created in the specified folder. This is useful for network file systems to avoid unnecessary network traffic.

KatePart syncs the swap files on the disk every 15 seconds, but only if they have changed since the last sync. You can change the sync interval as you like.

This is used to create a new filetype. After you click on this button, the fields below get empty and you can fill the properties you want for the new filetype.

To remove an existing filetype, select it from the drop down box and press the Delete button.

The name of the filetype will be the text of the corresponding menu item. This name is displayed in the Tools → Filetypes menu.

The section name is used to organize the file types in menus. This is also used in the Tools → Filetypes menu.

This string allows you to configure KatePart's settings for the files selected by this MIME type using KatePart variables. You can set almost any configuration option, such as highlight, indent-mode, etc.

Press Edit to see a list of all available variables and their descriptions. Select the checkbox on the left to enable a particular variable and then set the value of the variable on the right. Some variables provide a drop-down box to select possible values from while others require you to enter a valid value manually.

For complete information on these variables, see Configuring with Document Variables.

If you create a new file type, this drop down box allows you to select a filetype for highlighting.

The drop down box specifies the indentation mode for new documents.

The wildcards mask allows you to select files by filename. A typical mask uses an asterisk and the file extension, for example *.txt; *.text. The string is a semicolon-separated list of masks.

Displays a wizard that helps you easily select MIME types.

Sets a priority for this file type. If more than one file type selects the same file, the one with the highest priority will be used.