The Editor Component Configuration

Choose when the Dynamic word wrap indicators should be displayed, either Off, Follow Line Numbers or Always on.

Enables the start of dynamically wrapped lines to be aligned vertically to the indentation level of the first line. This can help to make code and markup more readable.

Additionally, this allows you to set a maximum width of the screen, as a percentage, after which dynamically wrapped lines will no longer be vertically aligned. For example, at 50%, lines whose indentation levels are deeper than 50% of the width of the screen will not have vertical alignment applied to subsequent wrapped lines.

The editor will display a » symbol to indicate the presence of a tab in the text.

The editor will display dots to indicate the presence of extra whitespace at the end of lines.

If this is checked, the editor will display vertical lines to help identifying indent lines.

If this is enabled, the range between the selected matching brackets will be highlighted.

If this option is checked, the current view will display marks for code folding, if code folding is available.

If this is checked, you will see an icon border on the left hand side. The icon border shows bookmark signs for instance.

If this is checked, you will see line numbers on the left hand side.

If this is checked, line modification markers will be visible. For more information, see the section called “Line Modification Indicators”.

If this option is checked the current view will show marks on the vertical scrollbar. These marks will for instance show bookmarks.

If this option is checked, every new view will show a mini map of the whole document on the vertical scrollbar.

For more information on the scrollbar minimap, see the section called “The Scrollbar Minimap”

Adjusts the width of the scrollbar mini-map, defined in pixels.

Each new bookmark will be added to the bottom, independently from where it is placed in the document.

The bookmarks will be ordered by the line numbers they are placed at.

This is the default background for the editor area, it will be the dominant color on the editor area.

This is the background for selected text. The default is the global selection color, as set in your KDE color preferences.

Set the color for the current line. Setting this a bit different from the Normal text background helps to keep focus on the current line.

Set the color for the text that matches your last search.

Set the color for the text that matches your last replace operation.

This color is used for the marks, line numbers and folding marker borders in the left side of the editor view when they are displayed.

This color is used to draw the line numbers on the left side of the view when displayed.

This color is used to draw a pattern to the left of dynamically wrapped lines when those are aligned vertically, as well as for the static word wrap marker.

This color is used to highlight the section of code that would be folded when you click on the code folding arrow to the left of a document. For more information, see the code folding documentation.

This color is used to highlight to the left of a document lines that have been modified but not yet saved. For more information, see the section called “Line Modification Indicators”

This color is used to highlight to the left of a document lines that have been modified this session and saved. For more information, see the section called “Line Modification Indicators”

This color is used to indicate spelling mistakes.

This color is used to draw white space indicators, when they are enabled.

This color is used to draw a line to the left of indented blocks, if that feature is enabled.

This color is used to draw the background of matching brackets.

This color is used to indicate bookmarks. For more information, see the section called “Using Bookmarks  ”.

This color is used by the GDB plugin to indicate an active breakpoint. For more information, see the GDB Plugin documentation.

This color is used by the GDB plugin to indicate a breakpoint you have reached while debugging. For more information, see the GDB Plugin documentation.

This color is used by the GDB plugin to indicate an inactive breakpoint. For more information, see the GDB Plugin documentation.

This color is used by the GDB plugin the line presently being executed. For more information, see the GDB Plugin documentation.

This color is used by the build plugin to indicate a line that has caused a compiler warning. For more information, see the Build Plugin documentation.

This color is used by the build plugin to indicate a line that has caused a compiler error. For more information, see the Build Plugin documentation.

This color is used by the Kate Snippets plugin to mark the background of a snippet. For more information, see the Kate Snippets documentation.

This color is used by the Kate Snippets plugin to mark a placeholder that you can click in to edit manually. For more information, see the Kate Snippets documentation.

This color is used by the Kate Snippets plugin to mark the placeholder that you are presently editing. For more information, see the Kate Snippets documentation.

This color is used by the Kate Snippets plugin to mark a placeholder that cannot be edited manually, such as one that is automatically populated. For more information, see the Kate Snippets documentation.

Turns static word wrap on or off.

If this option is checked, a vertical line will be drawn at the word wrap column as defined in the Settings → Configure Editor... in the Editing tab. Please note that the word wrap marker is only drawn if you use a fixed pitch font.

If the Enable static word wrap option is selected this entry determines the length (in characters) at which the editor will automatically start a new line.

If this option is enabled and the text selection is empty, copy and cut action are performed for the line of text at the actual cursor position.

When selected, pressing the home key will cause the cursor to skip white space and go to the start of a line's text.

This option changes the behavior of the cursor when the user presses the Page Up or Page Down key. If unselected the text cursor will maintain its relative position within the visible text in Kate as new text becomes visible as a result of the operation. So if the cursor is in the middle of the visible text when the operation occurs it will remain there (except when one reaches the beginning or end.) With this option selected, the first key press will cause the cursor to move to either the top or bottom of the visible text as a new page of text is displayed.

Sets the number of lines to maintain visible above and below the cursor when possible.

Selections will be overwritten by typed text and will be lost on cursor movement.

Selections will stay even after cursor movement and typing.

This option lets you scroll past the end of the document. This can be used to vertically centre the bottom of the document, or put it on top of the current view.

When this is enabled the editor will insert tabulator characters when you press the Tab key or use automatic indentation.

When this is enabled the editor will insert a calculated number of spaces according to the position in the text and the tab-width setting when you press the Tab key or use automatic indentation.

When this is enabled, the editor will insert spaces as describe above when indenting or pressing Tab at the beginning of a line, but insert tabulators when the Tab key is pressed in the middle or end of a line.

This configures the number of spaces that are displayed in place of a tabulator character.

The indentation width is the number of spaces which is used to indent a line. If configured to indent using tabulators, a tabulator character is inserted if the indentation is divisible by the tab width.

If this option is disabled, changing the indentation level aligns a line to a multiple of the width specified in Indentation width.

If this option is selected, text pasted from the clipboard is indented. Triggering the Undo action removes the indentation.

If this option is selected, the Backspace key decreases the indentation level if the cursor is located in the leading blank space of a line.

If you want Tab to align the current line in the current code block like in emacs, make Tab a shortcut to the action Align.

If enabled, a word completion box automatically pops up during typing showing a list of text entries to complete the current text under the cursor.

When selected, the vi input mode will be enabled when opening a new view. You can still toggle the vi input mode on/off for a particular view in the Edit menu.

When selected, Vi commands will override Kate's built-in commands. For example: Ctrl+R will redo, and override the standard action (showing the search and replace dialog).

By default, an extra status bar will be used when the Vi input mode is enabled. This status bar shows commands while they are being typed and messages/errors produced by Vi commands.

Checking this option will hide this extra status line.

This defines the standard encoding to use to open/save files, if not changed in the open/save dialog or by using a command line option.

Select an item from the drop down box, either to disable autodetection or use Universal to enable autodetection for all encodings. But as this may probably only detect utf-8/utf-16, selecting a region will use custom heuristics for better results. If neither the encoding chosen as standard above, nor the encoding specified in the open/save dialog, nor the encoding specified on command line match the content of the file, this detection will be run.

This defines the fallback encoding to try for opening files if neither the encoding chosen as standard above, nor the encoding specified in the open/ save dialog, nor the encoding specified on command line match the content of the file. Before this is used, an attempt will be made to determine the encoding to use by looking for a byte order marker at start of file: if one is found, the right unicode encoding will be chosen; otherwise encoding detection will run, if both fail fallback encoding will be tried.

Choose your preferred end of line mode for your active document. You have the choice between UNIX®, DOS/Windows® or Macintosh.

Check this if you want the editor to autodetect the end of line type. The first found end of line type will be used for the whole file.

The byte order mark is a special sequence at the beginning of unicode encoded documents. It helps editors to open text documents with the correct unicode encoding. For more information see Byte Order Mark.

Unfortunately, due to deficiencies in Qt™, Kate experiences poor performance when working with extremely long lines. For that reason, Kate will automatically wrap lines when they are longer than the number of characters specified here. To disable this, set this to 0.

The editor will automatically eliminate extra spaces at the ends of lines of text while loading/saving the file.

The editor will automatically append a newline to the end of the file if one is not already present upon saving the file.

The editor will search the given number of folder levels upwards for Kate config file and load the settings line from it. Further information about these hidden folder config files you find in the document variables section.

Check this if you want backups of local files when saving.

Check this if you want backups of remote files when saving.

Enter the prefix to prepend to the backup file names.

Enter the suffix to add to the backup file names.

Kate is able to recover (most of) what was written after last save in case of a crash or power failure. A swap file (.swp.<filename>) is created after the first editing action on a document. If the user doesn’t save the changes and Kate crashes, the swap file remains on the disk. When opening a file, Kate checks if there is a swap file for the document and if it is, it asks the user whether he wants to recover the lost data or not. The user has the possibility to view the differences between the original file and the recovered one, too. The swap file is deleted after every save and on normal exit.

Kate syncs the swap files on the disk every 15 seconds, but only if they have changed since the last sync. The user can disable the swap files syncing if he wants, by checking the Disable swap file syncing box, but this can lead to more data loss.

This is used to create a new filetype. After you click on this button, the fields below get empty and you can fill the properties you want for the new filetype.

To remove an existing filetype, select it from the drop down box and press the Delete button.

The name of the filetype will be the text of the corresponding menu item. This name is displayed in the Tools → Filetypes

The section name is used to organize the file types in menus. This is also used in the Tools → Filetypes menu.

This string allows you to configure Kate's settings for the files selected by this mimetype using Kate variables. You can set almost any configuration option, such as highlight, indent-mode, etc.

Press Edit to see a list of all available variables and their descriptions. Select the checkbox on the left to enable a particular variable and then set the value of the variable on the right. Some variables provide a drop-down box to select possible values from while others require you to enter a valid value manually.

For complete information on these variables, see Configuring with Document Variables.

If you create a new file type, this drop down box allows you to select a filetype for highlighting.

The drop down box specifies the indentation mode for new documents.

The wildcards mask allows you to select files by filename. A typical mask uses an asterisk and the file extension, for example *.txt; *.text. The string is a semicolon-separated list of masks.

Displays a wizard that helps you easily select mimetypes.

Sets a priority for this file type. If more than one file type selects the same file, the one with the highest priority will be used.