# Working with the &kate; editor

## Overview

The &kate; editor is the editing area of the &kate; window. This editor is also used by &kwrite;, and it can be used in &konqueror; for displaying text files from your local computer, or from the network.

The editor is composed of the following components:

The editing area

- This is where the text of your document is located.

The Scroll bars

- The scroll bars indicate the position of the visible part of the document text, and can be used to move around the document. Dragging the scrollbars will not cause the insertion cursor to be moved.

  The scroll bars are displayed and hidden as required.

The Icon Border

- The icon border is a small pane on the left side of the editor, displaying a small icon next to marked lines.

  You can set or remove a bookmark in a visible line by clicking the &LMB; in the icon border next to that line.

  The display of the icon border can be toggled using the View Show/Hide Icon Border menu item.

The Line Numbers Pane

- The Line Numbers Pane shows the line number of all visible lines in the document.

  The display of the Line Numbers Pane can be toggled using the View Show/Hide Line Numbers menu item.

The Folding Pane

- The folding pane allows you to collapse or expand foldable blocks of lines. The calculation of the foldable regions are done according to rules in the syntax highlight definition for the document.

## Also in this Chapter:

- Navigating in the Text

- Working with the Selection

- Copying and Pasting Text

- Finding and Replacing Text

- Using Bookmarks

- Automatically Wrapping Text

- Using automatic indenting

## Navigating in the Text

Moving around the text in &kate; is like in most graphical text editors. You move the cursor using the arrow keys and the Page Up, Page Down, Home and End keys in combination with the Ctrl and Shift modifiers. The Shift key is always used to generate a selection, while the Ctrl key have different effects on different keys:

- For the Up and Down keys it means scroll rather than move the cursor.

- For the Left and Right keys it means skip words rather than characters.

- for the Page Up and Page Down keys it means move to the visible edge of the view rather than browse.

- For the Home and End keys it means move to the beginning or end of the document rather than the beginning or end of the line.

&kate; also provides you with a way to quickly jump to a matching brace or paranthesis. Place the cursor on the inside of a parenthesis or brace character, and press Ctrl 6 to jump to the matching parenthesis or brace.

In addition you can use bookmarks to quickly jump to positions that you define on your own.

## Working with the Selection

There are two basic ways of selecting text in &kate;: using the mouse and using the keyboard.

To select text using the mouse, hold down the &LMB; while dragging the mouse cursor from the point where the selection should start to the desired end point. The text gets selected as you drag.

Double-clicking a word will select that word.

Triple-clicking in a line will select the entire line.

If &Shift; is held down while clicking, text will be selected as follow:

- If nothing is already selected, from the text cursor position to the mouse cursor position.

- If there is already a selection, from the selection start point to the mouse cursor position.

When selecting text by dragging the mouse, the selected text is copied to the clipboard and can be pasted by clicking the middle mouse button in the editor, or in any other application to which you want to paste the text.

To select text using the keyboard, hold down the &Shift; key while using the navigation keys (the arrow keys, Page Up, Page Down, Home and End, possibly in combination with &Ctrl; to extend the move of the text cursor).

See also the section Navigating in the Text in this chapter.

To copy the current selection, use the Edit Copy menu item or the keyboard shortcut (defaults to &Ctrl;C).

To deselect the current selection, use the Edit Deselect menu item, or the keyboard shortcut (default is &Ctrl;&Shift;A), or click with the &LMB; in the editor.

### Using Block Selection

When the Block Selection Mode is enabled, you can make vertical selections in the text, meaning selecting limited columns from multiple lines. This is handy for working with tab separated lines for example.

Block Selection Mode can be toggled using the Edit Block Selection Mode menu item. The default keyboard shortcut is &Ctrl;&Shift;B.

### Using Normal Selection Mode

If Normal Selection Mode is enabled, typing or pasting text into the selection will cause the selected text to be replaced. If not enabled, new text will be added at the position of the text cursor.

Normal Selection Mode is enabled by default.

To change the setting for this option, use the Cursor & Selection page of the configuration dialog.

### Using Persistent Selection Mode

When Persistent Selection Mode is enabled, typing characters or moving the cursor will not cause the selection to become deselected. This means that you can move the cursor away from the selection and type text.

Persistent Selection Mode is disabled by default.

Persistent Selection Mode can be enabled in the Cursor & Selection page of the configuration dialog.

## Copying and Pasting Text

To copy text, select it and use the Edit Copy menu item. Additionally, selecting text with the mouse will cause selected text to be copied to the clipboard.

To paste the text currently in the clipboard, use the Edit Paste menu item.

Additionally, text selected with the mouse may be pasted by clicking the middle mouse button at the desired position.

You can also retrieve earlier copied text from any application using the &klipper; icon in the &kicker; icon tray.

## Finding and Replacing Text

### The Find Text and Replace Text Dialogs

The Find and Replace Text dialogs in &kate; are very much the same, except the Replace Text dialog offers the means of entering a replacement string along with a few extra options.

The dialogs offer the following common options:

Text to Find

- This is where to enter the search string. The interpretation of the string depends on some of the options described below.

Regular expression

- If checked, the search string is interpreted as a regular expression. A button for using a graphical tool to create or edit the expression will be enabled.

  See Regular Expressions for more on these.

Case sensitive

- If enabled, the search will be case sensitive.

Whole words only

- If checked, the search will only match if there is a word boundary at both ends of the string matching, meaning neither an alphanumeric character, nor some other visible characters, nor a line end.

From cursor

- If checked, the search will start at the current cursor position, otherwise it will start at the beginning of the document.

Find backwards

- If checked, the search will look for the first match above the starting point, either the cursor position or the beginning of the document depending on the status of the From cursor option.

Selected text

- This option is not available if no text is selected. If some text has been selected and the option is checked, the search string will be matched only against the selected text.

The Replace Text dialog offers some additional options:

Replace With

- This is where to enter the replacement string.

Use placeholders

- When regular expressions are enabled, you can select part of the searched text by enclosing it within parenthesis. Placeholders allow you to insert such text in the replacement string, similar to how backreferences are used in sed. When enabled, any occurrence of \N (where N is an integer number, e.g. \1, \2, ...) will be replaced with the corresponding string capture (parenthesized substring) from the search pattern. A button for listing all available string captures will also be enabled. You can click on any of the available string captures to include them in your replacement string.

  Placeholders can only be used when searching using regular expressions.

Prompt on replace

- If checked, a small dialog will prompt you for what to do for each time a match is found. It offers the following options:

  Replace

- Use this button to replace the current match, which is selected in the editor. After the replacement, search for the next match automatically.

Replace & Close

- Use this button to replace the current match, which is selected in the editor. After the replacement, close the dialog.

Replace All

- Use this button to replace all matches without further prompt.

Find next

- Use this button to skip replacing the current match and try to find the next one.

Close

- Use this button to skip replacing the current match and close the dialog.

### Finding Text

To find text, launch the Find Text dialog with &Ctrl;F or from the Edit Find... menu item, enter a search string, set the options as desired and hit the Find button.

If a match is found it is selected and the Find Text dialog is hidden. Finding further matches is very easy.

To find the next match in the search direction, use the Edit Find Next command or press F3.

To find the next match in the opposite direction, use the Edit Find Previous command or press &Shift;F3.

If no match is found before reaching the document end (or beginning if you are searching backward), you will be asked if you want to continue the search from the other end of the document.

### Replacing Text

To replace text, launch the Replace Text dialog using the Edit Replace... command or the &Ctrl;R shortcut, enter a search string and optionally a replace string, set the options as desired and hit the Replace button. If the replace string is empty, each match will be removed.

If you are using a regular expression to find the text to replace, you can employ placeholders to reuse text captured in parenthesized subpatterns of the expression.

You can do `find`, `replace` and `ifind` (incremental search) from the editor command line.

### Finding text in multiple files

To search for text in multiple files at once, please refer to the Find in Files Panel section.

## Using Bookmarks

The bookmarks feature allows you to mark certain lines, to be able to easily find them again.

You can set or remove a bookmark in a line in two ways:

- Move the insertion cursor to the line and activate the Bookmarks Set Bookmark (&Ctrl;B) command.

- Click on the Icon Border Pane next to the line.

Bookmarks are available in the Bookmarks menu. The individual bookmarks are available as menu items, labeled with the line number of the line with the bookmark, and the first few characters of the text in the line. To move the insertion cursor to the beginning of a bookmarked line, open the menu and select the bookmark.

To quickly move between bookmarks or to the next/previous bookmark, use the Bookmarks Next (Alt Page Down) or Bookmarks Previous (Alt Page Up ) commands.

To remove a single bookmark, move the insertion cursor to the line of that bookmark and activate the Bookmarks Clear Bookmark (&Ctrl;B) command.

To remove all bookmarks at once, use the Bookmarks Clear All Bookmarks menu entry.

## Wrapping text

There are two types of text wrapping:

- Static word wrapping

- Dynamic word wrapping

### Static word wrapping

This feature allows you to have the text formatted in a very simple way: the text will be wrapped, so that no lines exceed a maximum number of characters per line, unless there is a longer string of non-whitespace characters.

To enable/disable it, check/uncheck the Enable static word wrap checkbox in the Editing page of the configuration dialog.

To set the maximum line length (maximum characters per line), use the Wrap words at option in the Editing page of the configuration dialog.

If enabled, static word wrapping has the following effects:

- While typing, the editor will automatically insert a hard line break after the last whitespace character at a position before the maximum line width is reached.

- While loading a document, the editor will wrap the text in a similar way so that no lines will be longer than the maximum line length, if they contain any whitespace allowing that.

### Dynamic word wrapping

This feature allows the text lines to be wrapped at the view border of the screen. The wrapping only affects the view, no hard line break character is inserted in the text.

To enable/disable it, check/uncheck the Dynamic word wrap checkbox in the Appearance page of the configuration dialog.

## Using automatic indentation

The &kate; editor component supports several autoindenting modes, designed for different text formats. You can pick from the available modes using the Tools Indentation menu. The autoindent modules also provides a function Tools Align which will recalculate the indentation of the selected or current line. Thus, you may reindent your entire document by selecting all the text and activating that action.

All the indent modes use the indentation related settings in the active document.

You can set all sorts of configuration variables, including those related to indentation using Document Variables and File types.

## Available Autoindent Modes

None

- Selecting this mode turns automatic indentation off entirely.

Normal

- This indenter simply keeps the indentation similar to the previous line with any content other than whitespace. You can combine this with using the indent and unindent actions for indenting to your own taste.

C Style

- An indenter for C and similar languages, such as C++, C#, java, javascript and so on. This indenter will not work with scripting languages such as Perl or PHP.

Python Style

- An indenter specifically designed for the python scripting language.

XML

- A very nice XML auto-indenter. However tempting, do not try to use this with HTML other than XHTML, because it fails with the old style HTML tags (open tags like for example <br>)

S&S C Style

- An alternative indenter for C and similar languages, with the same constraints.

Variable Based Indenter

- The variable based indenter is special in that it can be configured using variables in the document or in a filetype configuration. The following variables are read:

  var-indent-indent-after

- A regular expression which will cause a line to be indented by one unit, if the first non-whitespace-only line above matches.

var-indent-indent

- A regular expression, which will cause a matching line to be indented by one unit if matching.

var-indent-unindent

- A regular expression which will cause the line to be unindented by one unit if matching.

var-indent-triggerchars

- A list of characters that should cause the indention to be recalculated immediately when typed.

var-indent-handle-couples

- A list of paranthesis sets to handle. Any combination of 'paranthesis', 'braces' and 'brackets'. Each set type is handled in the following way. If there are unmatched opening instances on the above line, one indent unit is added. If there are unmatched closing instances on the current line, one indent unit is removed.

`var-indent-couple-attribute`

- When looking for unmatched couple openings/closings, only characters with this attribute are considered. The value must be the attribute name from the syntax xml file, for example "Symbol". If it is not specified, attribute 0 is used (usually 'Normal Text').