Kate

An article about a text editor for linux, named Kate, popped up at me today. I'd never heard of it before, and being pretty unhappy with the usual assortment of Linux-based text editors, I was initially interested. Maybe I'll fire up my Ubuntu partition and give it a try. My reaction to the screenshots, though, is "meh."

A bit of hilarity from the article:

Having a spell checker built into a text editor is a rarity.

Really?

All the text editors I use on a regular basis have spell-check. Moreover, I can't remember the last time I used a text editor that didn't have spell-check.

I think my ideal text editor would be a combination of TextMate and Acme, with the proviso that copy and paste had better be mapped to ⌘-C and ⌘-V, because that's what I learned when I was 10. Cx-y, for "yank," makes no sense to anyone who grew up in the '80s. I really want contextual side windows that show me other occurrences of highlighted tokens, documentation, etc. It should be automatic, and know that I have a big monitor and therefore do not want my focus replaced to save screen space.