Kate editor

Raised as a usability problem by 17 people on Hacker News over 9 years (2018–2026), in 13 threads.

People raised many different problems with Kate editor, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 19 complaints

Each tab is a separate editor, so F3 search doesn't carry over between tabs2026-03-11
Can't find a good cheat-sheet for keyboard shortcuts2025-12-16
Couldn't get syntax highlighting and autosuggest working despite hours of documentation searching2025-08-29
Too much UI clutter, making it a poor simple notepad alternative2025-04-22
Kate lags when scrolling or adding lines in ~100KB files2025-04-22
Feels like a major UX step down; KDE aesthetics seem to maximize clutter2025-04-21
Must create a session and manually pick it on reopen to restore workflow2025-01-22
Shipped keyboard shortcuts make the editor completely unusable on macOS2024-04-16
Default shortcuts clash with macOS conventions, so users must manually override them2024-04-15
Early version was so buggy and crashy it was unusable2024-04-15
Default theme flashes bright on every launch2024-04-14
Opening Kate shows a welcome screen, so the user must find 'new file' before typing2023-03-18
Can't insert the letter 'g' in vim mode2022-10-08
Editor freezes for tens of seconds when pasting over 100k log lines2021-06-26
KDE 4 version became literally unusable for the commenter, specifics forgotten2020-12-15
Find shortcut forgets the search term when switching between open documents2020-12-15
Takes more time to configure the way the user wants than Geany2020-06-17
Kate window takes painfully long to repaint after alt-tabbing back to it2020-05-09
Kate's tab handling is so bad it interrupts productive work2018-12-27