Many free and Open Source text editors are available, but some are simple, some are complex, and some fill a niche. Few, however, cross over into doing it all with a very usable interface.

When you first start up Kate, you will see it's not rocket science. You're presented with a simple interface that lets you start typing immediately. However, as your eyes move around, you will notice various settings in a few different places around the edges as well as a ribbon-style toolbar at the top. You know you're onto something different here at this point.

Kate has a split-mode window feature that can be used horizontally or vertically. It can also have multiple sessions and supports plug-ins. It also has encoding support, the ability to open files on a network, and is scriptable. Bookmarks are available for all your documents, and line numbers are always visible. The bookmarks are always to the side and can pop out and back as needed. It has highlighting support for specific words and over 250 languages. Of course, it also has on-the-fly spell-checking and search and replace functions.

Programmers will appreciate scriptable auto-indentation, smart comment and uncomment handling, auto-completion with argument hints, and rectangular block selection mode.

Finally, what would all of these features be without a backup? You can always save at any time, but Kate can also swap files to recover data on system crash and features a undo/redo system.

Kate has all the features that you might find with a professional text editor at any price.

View and edit multiple documents at the same time by splitting horizontally and vertically the window
A lot of plug-ins: Embedded terminal, SQL plug-in, build plug-in, GDB plug-in, Replace in Files, and more
Multi-document interface (MDI)
Session support
Encoding support (Unicode and lots of others)
Bi-directional text rendering support
Line-ending support (Windows, Unix, Mac), including auto-detection
Network transparency (open remote files)
Extensible through scripting
Bookmarking system (also supported: breakpoints etc.)
Scroll bar marks
Line modification indicators
Line numbers
Code folding
Highlighting support for over 300 languages
Bracket matching
Smart on-the-fly spell checking
Highlighting of selected words
Scriptable auto-indentation
Smart comment and uncomment handling
Auto-completion with argument hints
Vi input mode
Rectangular block selection mode
And more...

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