#Kate editor drives me nuts.

On macOS : home/end keys have no effect whatsoever in a document window, but in a diff output window they behave as expected (jumping to start or end of window).

On FreeBSD (XFCE or Plasma) : home/end keys just move the cursor somewhere toward the beginning of current line* or at the end.

(*tap home once, cursor jumps before first non-blank character, tap home a second time, cursor jumps at true beginning of current line)

So I guess, somehow, it’s a behavior that could be tuned. Full disclosure, I have no clue how to change that.

J’ai comparé BBEdit et Kate, rapidement et à l’aune de mes usages/besoins :
https://www.patpro.net/blog/index.php/2026/04/05/3845-kate-lediteur-de-texte-foss/

#BBEdit #Kate

At a conference like #easterhegg , you see each dev's accidental secret:
their development setup.
And I discovered there are more people using #kate as their #programming editor!

#KDE makes some good software.

https://kate-editor.org/

#eh23 #easterhegg23 #easterhegg2026 #coding #freesoftware #opensource

So, I made a Q&D benchmark of #BBEdit vs #Kate on macOS, opening and manipulating a huge text file : 915MB, +14M lines, some lines longer than 150K characters.

Kate opens the file faster, but everything else is slower. Kate also has a tunable limit of line length (default to 10K), documents with lines longer than that limit are opened read-only, unless you choose to override the limit when prompted to.
Also, above a given file size, Kate seems to disable some features, probably to preserve performance.

BBEdit has super great text manipulation features, designed with the user in mind (nice GUI to tune a line sorting operation, a complex line extraction, dupe removal, etc.).
Most of these features are non-existant in Kate. But one can achieve very similar results with the great «Filter Through Command…» menu. Just enter your usual grep/awk/tr/sed/sort/whatever command and get the result.