Re: Wish me luck

On 12/10/2024 12:31 PM, Joel wrote:
 > When you have LO and WPS Office
You've been beaten down multiple times on this, since 2010.  LO and WPS Office can't compete with MS Office.
 > and gedit and Kate, DFS's
 > proclamations of running Win10/11 even on a computer like mine is just
 > not having the best appreciation.
Here are the programmer editor features I really would rather not do without:
1 block commenting - insert or remove a comment symbol in front of a
   selected block of lines
2 line sort operations
3 show symbols (mainly end of line and tabs)
4 function list
5 change tab sizing
6 language syntax highlighting
7 column mode (might be called block selection)
8 search across folders/multiple documents.
Advanced editors have most or all those features, plus a million more.
I downloaded Kate for Windows (24.08.0, thru the MS Store) and gave it a try.  It's very, very good.
1  it does block commenting
2  kate sorts lines (right-click | Editing | Sort Selected Text Alpha),
    but won't sort these correctly:
line 29
line 3
29th line
3rd line
29 line
3 line
Notepad++ does, with the 'Sort Lines as Integers' option
3  kate shows tab marks by default (but I couldn't find a way to show
    end of line characters).
4  found function list in Settings | Configure Kate | Plugins | Symbol
    Viewer
5  change tab size in Settings | Configure Kate | Editing | Indentation
    | Tabulators
6  of course kate has syntax highlighting, for dozens of languages
7  kate slightly outdoes Notepad++ on column mode / block selection.
    With Notepad++ you have to hold down left Alt and drag, with kate
    there's a check box to turn it off and on.  So it's a little easier
    to do block selection in kate.
8  kate will search / replace in multiple files / in a folder
kate has some other nice features:
* appearance, color and theme settings that are easy to use.
* there's a little clickable breadcrumb line at the top of the open file
   showing the directory structure.  Cool!
* the mini-map to the right of the screen makes scrolling easier
niggles:
* bloated: kate uses 46MB of memory vs 17MB for Notepad++
* slower than Notepad++
* I don't like the Welcome screen that comes up by default (edit - found
   a way to turn it off)
* far fewer plugins than available with Notepad++
Based on my limited usage, kate is a really good editor I could live with in Linux.