Kate

Windows · Mac · Linux

Freedom report

Three barsScore 8.0

Kate is ranked #3 of 82 in text editors on Freedom251. It runs on Linux, macOS, Windows. There is a free plan.

Kate plans and pricing

Kate Free Text editor for Linux, Windows and macOS kate-editor.org · 4 Oct 2026

Supported platforms: Linux, BSD, Windows, macOS
Multi-cursor editing: Yes
Macro recording: Yes
Column editing: Yes
Product: Kate is a text editor for viewing and editing text files.
Multiple documents: Users can view and edit multiple documents at once in horizontally or vertically split windows.
Syntax highlighting: Kate supports syntax highlighting for over 400 languages, bracket matching and on-the-fly spell checking.
Programming: Programming features include auto-completion with argument hints, scriptable auto-indentation and Vi input mode.
Search: Search and replace supports regular expressions, multiline searches and files on disk or multiple open files.
Plugins: Listed plugins include an embedded terminal, SQL, build, GDB and Replace in Files plugins.
Language integration: The homepage says Kate uses the Language Server Protocol to provide auto-completion for many languages.
File handling: Kate supports opening remote files and Unicode and other encodings.
Recovery: Kate includes backups on save and swap files to recover data after a system crash.
Platforms: The download page provides installation options for Linux, Windows and macOS, including nightly packages.
Price from: Free

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