kate - Man Page
Advanced text editor by KDE
Examples (TL;DR)
- Open specific files:
kate path/to/file1 path/to/file2 ... - Open specific remote files:
kate https://example.com/path/to/file1 https://example.com/path/to/file2 ... - Create a new editor instance even if one is already open:
kate [-n|--new] - Open a file with the cursor at the specific line:
kate [-l|--line] line_number path/to/file - Open a file with the cursor at the specific line and column:
kate [-l|--line] line_number [-c|--column] column_number path/to/file - Create a file from
stdin:cat path/to/file | kate [-i|--stdin] - Display help:
kate [-h|--help]
Synopsis
kate [-s, --start name] [--startanon] [-n, --new] [-b, --block] [-p, --pid pid] [-e, --encoding name] [-l, --line line] [-c, --column column] [-i, --stdin] [--tempfile] [file]
Description
Kate is the KDE Advanced Text Editor.
Kate also provides the editor part for various applications, under the name KWrite.
Some of Kate's many features include configurable syntax highlighting for languages ranging from C and C++ to HTML to bash scripts, the ability to create and maintain projects, a multiple document interface (MDI), and a self-contained terminal emulator.
But Kate is more than a programmer's editor. Its ability to open several files at once makes it ideal for editing UNIX™'s many configuration files. This document was written in Kate.
Options
- -s, --start name
Start Kate with a given session.
- --startanon
Start Kate with a new anonymous session, implies -n.
- -n, --new
Force start of a new Kate instance (is ignored if start is used and another Kate instance already has the given session opened), forced if no parameters and no URLs are given at all.
- -b, --block
If using an already running Kate instance, block until it exits, if URLs given to open.
- -p, --pid pid
Only try to reuse kate instance with this pid (is ignored if start is used and another Kate instance already has the given session opened).
- -e, --encoding name
Set encoding for the file to open.
You can use this to force a file opened in utf-8 format, for instance. (The command iconv -l provides a list of encodings, which may be helpful to you.)
- -l, --line line
Navigate to this line.
- -c, --column column
Navigate to this column.
- -i, --stdin
Read the contents of stdin.
- --tempfile
The files/URLs opened by the application will be deleted after use.
- file
File to open.
See Also
More detailed user documentation is available from help:/kate (either enter this URL into Konqueror, or run khelpcenter help:/kate).
kf6options(7)
qt6options(7)
There is also further information available at the Kate website[1].
Examples
To open a file named source.cpp at column 15, line 25, in an existing Kate window, you could use:
kate -c 15 -l 25 source.cpp
If you have an active internet connection, you can take advantage of KDE's network transparency to open a file from an FTP site. If you do not have write permission on the remote server, the file will be opened read only and you will be prompted for a local filename to save to if you make changes. If you do have write permission, changes will be saved transparently over the network.
kate ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/README
Authors
The maintainer of Kate is Christoph Cullmann <cullmann@kde.org>. A comprehensive list of authors and contributors is available in the complete user manual mentioned above.
Author
Lauri Watts <lauri@kde.org>
Author.
Notes
- 1.
Kate website
https://kate-editor.org/