The Editor Component Command Line

Kate's editor component has an internal command line, allowing you to perform various actions from a minimal GUI. The command line is a text entry in the bottom of the editor area, to show it select View → Switch to Command Line or use the shortcut (default is F7). The editor provides a set of commands as documented below, and additional commands can be provided by plugins.

To execute a command, type the command then press the return key. The command line will indicate whether it succeeded and possibly display a message. If you entered the command line by pressing F7 it will automatically hide after a few seconds. To clear the message and enter a new command, press F7 again.

The command line has a built-in help system, issue the command help to get started. To see a list of all available commands issue help list, to view help for a specific command, do help command.

The command line has a built in history, so you can reuse commands already typed. To navigate the history, use the Up and Down keys. When showing historical commands, the argument part of the command will be selected, allowing you to easily overwrite the arguments.

Standard Command Line Commands

Argument types

BOOLEAN: This is used with commands that turns things on or off. Legal values are on, off, true, false, 1 or 0.
INTEGER: An integer number.
STRING: A string, surrounded by single quotes (') or double quotes (") when it contains spaces.

Commands for Configuring the Editor

These commands are provided by the editor component, and allows you to configure the active document and view only. This is handy if you want to use a setting different from the default settings, for example for indentation.

set-tab-width {INTEGER width}

Sets the tab width to the number width.

set-indent-width {INTEGER width}

Sets the indentation width to the number width. Used only if you are indenting with spaces.

set-word-wrap-column {INTEGER width}

Sets the line width for hard wrapping to width. This is used if you are having your text wrapped automatically.

set-icon-border {BOOLEAN enable}

Sets the visibility of the icon border.

set-folding-markers {BOOLEAN enable}

Sets the visibility of the folding markers pane.

set-line-numbers {BOOLEAN enable}

Sets the visibility of the line numbers pane.

set-replace-tabs {BOOLEAN enable}

If enabled, tabs are replaced with spaces as you type.

set-remove-trailing-space {BOOLEAN enable}

If enabled, trailing whitespace are removed whenever the cursor leaves a line.

set-show-tabs {BOOLEAN enable}

If enabled, TAB characters and trailing whitespace will be visualized by a small dot.

set-show-indent {BOOLEAN enable}

If enabled, indentation will be visualized by a vertical dotted line.

set-indent-spaces {BOOLEAN enable}

If enabled, the editor will indent with indent-width spaces for each indentation level, rather than with one TAB character.

set-mixed-indent {BOOLEAN enable}

If enabled, Kate will use a mix of TAB and spaces for indentation. Each indentation level will be indent-width wide, and more indentation levels will be optimized to use as many TAB characters as possible.

When executed, this command will additionally set space indentation enabled, and if the indent width is unspecified it will be set to half of the tab-width for the document at the time of execution.

set-word-wrap {BOOLEAN enable}

Enables dynamic word wrap according to enable

set-replace-tabs-save {BOOLEAN enable }

When enabled, tabs will be replaced with whitespace whenever the document is saved.

set-remove-trailing-space-save {BOOLEAN enable}

When enabled, trailing space will be removed from each line whenever the document is saved.

set-indent-mode {STRING name}

Sets the autoindentation mode to name. If name is not known, the mode is set to 'none'. Valid modes are 'none', 'normal', 'cstyle', 'haskell', 'lilypond', 'lisp', 'python', 'ruby' and 'xml'.

set-auto-ident {BOOLEAN script}

Enable or disable autoindentation.

set-highlight {STRING highlight}

Sets the syntax highlighting system for the document. The argument must be a valid highlight name, as seen in the Tools → Highlighting menu. This command provides an autocompletion list for its argument.

reload-scripts

Reload all JavaScript scripts used by Kate, including indenters and command line scripts.

set-mode {STRING mode}

Choose the filetype scheme for the current document.

nn[oremap] {STRING original} {STRING mapped}

Map the key sequence original to mapped.

Commands for editing

These commands modify the current document.

indent

Indents the selected lines or the current line.

unindent

Unindents the selected lines or current line.

cleanindent

Cleans up the indentation of the selected lines or current line according to the indentation settings in the document.

comment

Inserts comment markers to make the selection or selected lines or current line a comment according to the text format as defined by the syntax highlight definition for the document.

uncomment

Removes comment markers from the selection or selected lines or current line according to the text format as defined by the syntax highlight definition for the document.

kill-line

Deletes the current line.

replace { STRING pattern} {STRING replacement}

Replaces text matching pattern with replacement. If you want to include whitespace in the pattern, you must quote both the pattern and replacement with single or double quotes. If the arguments are unquoted, the first word is used as pattern and the rest for replacement. If replacement is empty, each occurrence of pattern is removed.

You can set flags to configure the search by adding a colon, followed by one or more letters each representing a configuration, giving the form replace:options pattern replacement. Available options are:

b: Search backwards.
c: Search from cursor position.
e: Search in the selection only.
r: Do regular expression search. If set, you may use \N where N is a number to represent captures in the replacement string.
s: Do case sensitive search.
p: Prompt for permission to replace the next occurrence.
w: Match whole words only.

date {STRING format}

Inserts a date/time string as defined by the specified format, or the format “yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss” if none is specified. The following translations are done when interpreting format:

`d`	The day as number without a leading zero (1-31).
`dd`	The day as number with a leading zero (01-31).
`ddd`	The abbreviated localized day name (e.g. 'Mon'..'Sun').
`dddd`	The long localized day name (e.g. 'Monday'..'Sunday').
`M`	The month as number without a leading zero (1-12).
`MM`	The month as number with a leading zero (01-12).
`MMMM`	The long localized month name (e.g. 'January'..'December').
`MMM`	The abbreviated localized month name (e.g. 'Jan'..'Dec').
`yy`	The year as two digit number (00-99).
`yyyy`	The year as four digit number (1752-8000).
`h`	The hour without a leading zero (0..23 or 1..12 if AM/PM display).
`hh`	The hour with a leading zero (00..23 or 01..12 if AM/PM display).
`m`	The minute without a leading zero (0..59).
`mm`	The minute with a leading zero (00..59).
`s`	The second without a leading zero (0..59).
`ss`	The second with a leading zero (00..59).
`z`	The milliseconds without leading zeroes (0..999).
`zzz`	The milliseconds with leading zeroes (000..999).
`AP`	Use AM/PM display. AP will be replaced by either "AM" or "PM".
`ap`	Use am/pm display. ap will be replaced by either "am" or "pm".

char {STRING identifier}

This command allows you to insert literal characters by their numerical identifier, in decimal, octal or hexadecimal form. To use it launch the Editing Command dialog and type char: [number] in the entry box, then hit OK.

Example 5.1. char examples

Input: char:234

Output: ê

Input: char:0x1234

Output: ሴ

s///[ig] %s///[ig]

This command does a sed-like search/replace operation on the current line, or on the whole file (%s///).

In short, the text is searched for text matching the search pattern, the regular expression between the first and the second slash, and when a match is found, the matching part of the text is replaced with the expression between the middle and last part of the string. Parentheses in the search pattern create back references, that is the command remembers which part of the match matched in the parentheses; these strings can be reused in the replace pattern, referred to as \1 for the first set of parentheses, \2 for the second and so on.

To search for a literal ( or ), you need to escape it using a backslash character: \(\)

If you put an i at the end of the expression, the matching will be case insensitive. If you put a g at the end, all occurrences of the pattern will be replaced, otherwise only the first occurrence is replaced.

Example 5.2. Replacing text in the current line

Your friendly compiler just stopped, telling you that the class myClass mentioned in line 3902 in your source file is not defined.

"Buckle!" you think, it is of course MyClass. You go to line 3902, and instead of trying to find the word in the text, you launch the Editing Command Dialog, enter s/myclass/MyClass/i, hit the OK button, save the file and compile – successfully without the error.

Example 5.3. Replacing text in the whole file

Imagine that you have a file, in which you mention a “Miss Jensen” several times, when someone comes in and tells you that she just got married to “Mr Jones”. You want, of course, to replace each and every occurrence of “Miss Jensen” with “Ms Jones”.

Enter the command line and issue the command %s/Miss Jensen/Ms Jones/ and hit return, you are done.

Example 5.4. A More Advanced Example

This example makes use of back references as well as a character class (if you do not know what that is, please refer to the related documentation mentioned below).

Suppose you have the following line:

void MyClass::DoStringOps( String      &foo, String &bar, String *p, int  &a, int &b )

Now you realize that this is not nice code, and decide that you want to use the const keyword for all “address of” arguments, those characterized by the & operator in front of the argument name. You would also like to simplify the white space, so that there is only 1 whitespace character between each word.

Launch the Editing Command Dialog, and enter: s/\s+(\w+)\s+(&)/ const \1 \2/g and hit the OK button. The g at the end of the expression makes the regular expression recompile for each match to save the backreferences.

Output: void MyClass::DoStringOps( const String &foo, const String &bar, String *p, const int &a, const int &b )

Mission completed! Now, what happened? Well, we looked for some white space (\s+) followed by one or more alphabetic characters (\w+) followed by some more whitespace (\s+) followed by an ampersand, and in the process saved the alphabetic chunk and the ampersand for reuse in the replace operation. Then we replaced the matching part of our line with one whitespace followed by “const” followed by one whitespace followed by our saved alphabetical chunk (\1) followed by one whitespace followed by our saved ampersand (\2)

Now in some cases the alphabetical chunk was “String”, in some “int”, so using the character class \w and the + quantifier proved a valuable asset.

sort

Sorts the selected text or entire document.

natsort

Sort the selected lines or entire document naturally.

Example 5.5. sort vs. natsort

sort(a10, a1, a2) results in a1, a10, a2

natsort(a10, a1, a2) results in a1, a2, a10

moveLinesDown

Move selected lines down.

moveLinesUp

Move selected lines up.

uniq

Remove duplicated lines from the selected text or the whole document.

rtrim

Remove trailing space from the selected text or the whole document.

ltrim

Remove leading space from the selected text or the whole document.

join [STRING separator]

Join selected lines or whole document. Optionally takes a parameter defining a separator, for example: join ', '

rmblank

Remove all blank spaces from the selected text or the whole document.

unwrap

Unwrap the selected text or the whole document.

each {STRING script}

Given a JavaScript function as an argument, call that for the list of selected lines and replace them with the return value of that callback.

Example 5.6. Join selected lines

each 'function(lines){return lines.join(", ")}'

Or, more briefly:

each 'lines.join(", ")'

filter {STRING script}

Given a JavaScript function as an argument, call that for the list of selected lines and remove those where the callback returns false.

Example 5.7. Remove blank lines

filter 'function(1){return 1.length > 0;}'

Or, more briefly:

filter 'line.length > 0'

map {STRING script}

Given a JavaScript function as an argument, call that for the list of selected lines and replace the line with the value of the callback.

Example 5.8. Remove blank lines

map 'function(line){return line.replace(/^s+/,"");}'

Or, more briefly:

map 'line.replace(/^s+/,"")'

duplicateLinesUp

Duplicate the selected lines above the current selection.

duplicateLinesDown

Duplicate the selected lines below the current selection.

Commands for navigation

goto {INT line}

This command navigates to the specified line.

grep {STRING pattern}

Search the document for the regular expression pattern. For more information, see Appendix B, Regular Expressions

find {STRING pattern}

This command navigates to the first occurrence of pattern according to the configuration. Following occurrences can be found using Edit → Find Next (the default shortcut is F3).

The find command can be configured by appending a colon followed by one or more options, the form is find:options pattern. The following options are supported:

b: Search backwards.
c: Search from cursor position.
e: Search in the selection only.
r: Do regular expression search. If set, you may use \N where N is a number to represent captures in the replacement string.
s: Do case sensitive search.
w: Match whole words only.

ifind {STRING pattern}

This command provides “as-you-type” searching. You can configure the behavior of the search by appending a colon followed by one or more options, like this: ifind:options pattern. Allowed options are

b: Search backwards.
r: Do regular expression search.
s: Do case sensitive search.
c: Search from cursor position.

Commands for Basic Editor Functions (These are depending on the application the editor component is used in)

w: Save the current document.
wa: Save all currently open documents.
q: Close the current document.
qa: Close all open documents.
wq: Save and close the current document.
wqa: Save and close all currently open documents.
x: Save and close the current document only if it has changed.
x: Save and close all currently open documents only if they have changed.
bp: Go to the previous document in the documents list.
bn: Go to the next document in the documents list.
new: Open a new document in horizontal split view.
vnew: Open a new document in vertical split view.
e: Reload the current document if it has changed on disk.
enew: Edit a new document.
print: Open the Print dialog to print the current document.

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