'Kate' Supercharged My Markdown Editing

Kate as a Markdown Editor

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When you install KDE Plasma, one of the pieces of free software I love the most is Kate. This little-spoken-of text editor is a fantastic tool for many types of coding, thanks to its syntax highlighting. It underpins KDE development and has become a foundation stone for so much of the KDE ecosystem. It can also be installed on virtually any distro, so you never have to learn another text editor again.

I think it’s so good that it forms the basis of my writing stack for this very website.

Configuration

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To use Kate as a Markdown editor effectively, you should do a few things first.

1. Navigate to Tools → Spelling and turn on Automatic Spell Checking. The keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+Shift+O. That’s the letter O, not the number 0.

2. If the syntax highlighting isn’t detected automatically, navigate to Tools → Highlighting → Markup → Markdown.

3. Finally, navigate to Settings → Configure Kate (Ctrl+Shift+,). When the pop-up opens, find Plugins. On the right-hand side of the pop-up window, activate Document Preview. Click Apply, then OK.

Using Kate as a Markdown editor

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Those are the essentials. Now you have a very capable Markdown editor without leaving the KDE ecosystem, keeping your machine nice and bloat-free.

To use it properly, you should see that a new icon has appeared on the right-hand side of the screen. It looks like a piece of paper with a magnifying glass over it. Click that!

You can make the preview window bigger by left-clicking and dragging your mouse pointer over the vertical separator between the input and output windows.

It’s at this point that I would look for the Play button. The Play button turns on automatic updates, so you can type and see the result instantly. I can see why they added a convenient toggle. The constant updates can get distracting.

Snippets

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Kate has the fantastic ability to add code snippets directly into your files at the push of a button. That is really advantageous considering I work with Hugo daily.

To activate snippets, do the following:

• Open Kate.
• Go to Settings, then click Configure Kate.
• Select Plugins.
• Check the box for Scripts & Snippets.
• Click Apply and OK.

A new icon will appear on the right. It looks like a piece of paper with the corner folded, with a plus sign over the top. Click it!

Next, add a repository by clicking on the folder icon with a plus sign over it. A new pop-up will appear.

In this pop-up, you can add your repo. Fill out Your Name, Namespace and Repo Name. Once you have entered those details, click the OK button. I don’t pick a file type because Hugo doesn’t build from standard Markdown.

Once you have created your repo, you can add snippets. Click the small paper with plus sign icon in the panel above where you just created your new repository. Here, you can add a code snippet simply by pasting it in. Remember to give it a name, then click OK.

To use your new snippet, simply position your text cursor where you want to add the line of code and double-click the snippet.

Conclusion

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Kate is a fantastic tool, made even better by how easily it can be customised for your specific needs. I guarantee that if you spent a couple of hours exploring it, you would discover more uses for this excellent piece of software developed by KDE.

It’s so good that it even has Git integration built into it. So, if your site is stored in an online repo, you can edit the source from the comfort of your new favourite text editor.

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