The great editor wars are over. Emacs is dumb and stupid and vi is the One True Editor. Well, actually, I use vim. Or I use gVim if I’m using a desktop environment. But still, I’ve staked out my position.

Until recently. I was getting really frustrated with the Markdown highlighting in gVim. It was usually good, but sometimes it would get confused. Plus, the fact that Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+S, etc. didn’t work in a GUI was just jarring.

So I decided to give Kate a try. Kate is the “KDE Advanced Text Editor”, and since I already use KDE on my Linux machines, it seemed like a good place to start. I liked it so much that I installed on my MacBook Pro via MacPorts on a hotel WiFi connection (that was an overnight operation).

The better Markdown syntax support and word count features have made it my go-to for writing Opensource.com articles and other non-Blog-Fiasco content. I haven’t given it a try with LaTeX or DocBook yet, but I should. I still tend to use vim/gVim for code, in part because of inertia and in part because it’s often done over an SSH connection. I do like how Kate visually distinguishes between hard tabs and soft tabs when I work on Perl code, though.