Hmm. Geany could be worth a look...
At the moment I have to import half of KDE into Mint to get Kate up and running... looks like Geany has the same general philosophy.
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Kate and Geany are both good ATEs. I used Kate when KDE was in the 3.x days, then Geany in the time between KDE 4.x being adopted and it becoming stable enough, and now I'm back to Kate - though ever wavering.
I use Kate day-to-day, but if asked for a recommendation I'd probably say Geany is the better of the two. Kate seems to have a lot more niggles and irritating bugs which I hit. I feel that Geany behaves more like what most people would expect (ctrl+tabbing between recent documents is only a recent addition to Kate!).
Honestly, the only things keeping me with Kate at the moment are how the "Documents" side-pane works (Geany has functionality close, but not close enough), and the MiniMap/DocumentMap which can replace the scrollbar (one mailing list post I saw says it'd be "trivial" to implement in Geany, yet nobody has done it yet).
One thing Geany does much better than Kate IME is indentation. I've had nothing but pain with how Kate handles indentation (particularly, its complete lack of automatic detection).
I liked !Zap but I eventually moved to !StrongED for some reason. As I recall, much of my text editing was HTML and I preferred the way !StrongED worked though I eventually shifted to Quanta Plus on Linux, usually running on KDE3. For much of my ordinary text stuff, I use KWrite, though I do have Kate installed and have dabbled on occasion.
You can also try "medit". It is well-made alternative of Kate/KWrite/Gedit (which is now GTK3), GTK2 based, has all Gedit features that Gedit but also, like Geany, is more developer-oriented.
P.S. And if you like lightweight and fast editors, give "scite" a look. It is very very fast, can crunch large files (except when you have extremely long lines which can lead to slowness), has almost no dependencies, and also a cross-platform (works on Windows as fast as on Linux). It also includes some weird Lua-based inner platform but I never tried to script anything in it.
Shutter is really the best tool for screenshots that I discovered. It allows to make a quick edits in screens, crop them, annotate and then upload into cloud. Also you can drag-and-drop your images directly to Thunderbird to attach them to messages (from my experience, usually drag-and-drop sort of sucks in Linux).
As for other open source desktop-based software, you have to try a lots of junk before you will find real gems you can't live without.
I can definitely recommend Geany. I've used many editors over the years, and am very pleased with Geany and use it every day for editing C, Python, etc. It seems to fill the space between "simple editor" and "massive IDE" quite nicely. It's very configurable, so have a look in the preferences menu if there is something you don't like about the defaults. Chances are, there is an option to change it.
I used to use Kate, but that was at least five years ago, so I can't compare the latest versions of both. However, if you like Kate then you will probably be more than happy with Geany. It's also definitely several steps up from GEdit (which I used prior to Geany).
The biggest problem with comparing editors is that you get used to doing things a certain way, and any change, even for the better, can be hard to get used to. Geany has loads of editing features, and I only use a subset of them. If you take the time to explore while working on a project, then you will find many things which you can use to improve your work flow.
And the challenge is - can it cope with my indentation preferences?
Braces on a new line at the same indentation as the control, but variables *always* start on the left margin - this seems to confuse everything else.
Anyway, it's installed now, so time to play!
"At the moment I have to import half of KDE into Mint to get Kate up and running... looks like Geany has the same general philosophy."
FWIW I found it to be very quick and easy to download & build Geany on Mint Debian Edition (MATE desktop already installed). Geany starts up instantly and it does just enough to help but not too much to be awkward. It's simplicity & speed remind me of the old Borland ASCII IDEs, while it brings modern 'features' like auto-completion (which isn't as clever as Eclipse or Visual Studio - but works very well for me).
I think everyone should give it a go and if they don't like it they haven't wasted money or filled their hard drive with IDE or wasted 2 hours of their lives installing it. :)
1) Why did Mr. Dormon elect not to mention XBMC... (Ok then Kodi), then?
2) Tomahawk really? >2014 and still not streaming your stuff from the Browser though GMusic?
Besides I'd probably prefer Nightingale for that task. Though the HDD in my NAS just died, and the fact that I'm mostly on Windows7 at the moment. Kinda makes an informed opinion (from my side), a bit harder. Fortunately XBMC / Kodi, can also be used as an Audio Player too...
So why would Mr. Dormon fail to mention such an important piece Software like XBMC for?
After an age of 'streaming my stuff from gmusic through my browser' you've prompted me to give Tomahawk another go. Turns out it can now play music from Google Play Music (and everywhere else), and most importantly, it has a global keyboard shortcut, so I don't have to focus a browser tab to pause the music
Gimp 2.8+ sucks golf balls through garden hoses already, as they destroyed the Save dialog. I mean, causes serious waste of time for me ... I went back to 2.6, does the trick.
I guess 3.0 will require systemd ... 3.1 will probably be the last gimp version, ever. I bet the devs will even ask: "Why did you leave ?"
If a program sucks because you have to select a different menu to save I'd hate to see what your criteria is for a program being great. As far as systemd... gimp will use systemd because every system will have it which means the people using it won't even know systemd is involved so usage won't even budge.
...As far as systemd... gimp will use systemd because every system will have it ..
I look forward to seeing this on the XP and Win7 boxes I use the gimp on daily..I seriously want to see systemd try out-Borg the Borg..should be fun.
and yes Gimp 2.8 does suck..resources mainly (it isn't just the I'll-save-as-xcf-only irritation), it crashes a lot more than the 2.6 version running on the machines I normally use @work.
>>In a world where everyone carries a camera phone, and "photoshop" has entered the dictionary, GIMP is hardly a niche app.
Everyone (thinks they) know what "photoshop" means/does but being able to use the thing is still niche.
The fact you seem to suggest Gimp/Photoshop are the right tools for the masses to use with their cameraphone photos only compounds the sense that either you don't know what you're talking about, or are an expert user totally out of touch with the majority of computer users.
GIMP is a high end tool for people who are prepared to put effort in to learning how the darn thing works.
"Kdenlive is great, but it still crashes too often."
Interesting, I had lots of problems a few years ago but it's been rock solid on the 3 computers I use it on (i7 laptop 8GB, old AMD dual-core 2GB, Intel dual core 2GB) Certainly since I bought my current video camera early 2012 which is 1080p/50 so generates huge clips and rendered files. It took a few months for kdenlive to support 1080p/50. I'm using kdenlive 0.9.10 on OpenSUSE 13.1. What I did find was that all the necessary helper programs needed to be from the same repository
Strange, because I run also OpenSUSE 13.1 and my Kdenlive is definitely more crash prone than older versions. And is exactly the same version as yours, mine coming from packman as well as all the helper programs (I used packman not because I needed the higher Kdenlive version, but because I needed newer ffmpeg versions than the ones on the default repos for other parts of my media handling workflow) My Kdenlive is currently 0.9.10, with ffmpeg version 2.14 (reported but zypper says 2.3.3) and melt 0.9.2
And I too use it mainly to edit footage from my 1080/25p camera. So it must be down to how we use the program. You're clearly kinder on Kdenlive than I am.
Your answer however, triggered a few checks. The Kdenlive version in the default 13.2 repos is 0.9.8 (was 0.9.6 for 13.1), so still a couple of minor revisions away from what is on packman for 13.1. Packman does already have a repository for 13.2, and NVidia semi-official SUSE repository seems also to be available for 13.2.
So perhaps it is "big upgrade" time now...
The version I'm using reports 0.9.10, but Yast2 reports 0.9.10-16.2 64bit from Packman but I've been using older versions without any stability problems for years now - certainly before OpenSUSE 13.1. In the past there have been times when dragging a clip or rendering would crash so I took to saving ALL the time but not done that for years as I say.
I also had a problem with the program reporting that the rendering had failed but in fact the output was fine. Mind get_iplayer does that for me at the moment too.
You could also give lightworks a try http://www.lwks.com it is not open source but has a free version, you have to relicense(free) every month but it is cross platform Windows/OSX/Linux which is what I like and am waiting for the ten cross platform freeware apps, not so much in the article but the gems from fellow commentards :-)
J, Un-necessary for stuff that linux is good at like running servers. If you want to use a gui to write a letter, watch a video or manage you media then get Windows and stop trying to pretend that linux is as good. It isn't, just admit it and get on with life.
Chris,
I don't want to run windows on any of my [aged] boxes at home, hence why my personal preference is for Mint, personally I cannot justify buying newer kit so that I can run the latest versions of Windows.
I find Mint much easier on the brain than Windows, for me it just 'gets out of the way more' than Windows, also for audio web dev and video editing I have a MacPro/FCP/Studio.
I don't quite get your point about pretend[ing] linux is as good, if it meets a given users requirements then it is good enough.
Cheers,
J
J, You're an exception. Fully agree, I always say whatever gets the job done. Most linux fanbois will insist that windows is the devil's work which you should never touch under any circumstances while linux was created by their saviour, you must use it and never say it is not as good as windows. They close their eyes to all the hoops they have to jump through to get things to work and convince themselves after 10 days that whatever it was worked out of the box so to speak.
Chris has a valid point. Most of the Linux/FOSS GUI apps, and the bloated bug-infested libraries they're built upon, are crappy knock-offs of commercial software from the Windows/Mac worlds.
It's true, Windows is complete fucking garbage that costs too much except when it comes with a new machine, but often it's the best platform for running other crapware... especially trendy throwaway apps that'll be relegated to the dustbin in a few years. It's sad to see developers wasting their (unpaid) time on the futile imitation of commercial hypeware that doesn't fit the open-source / volunteer / DIY model. That's just my opinion, man. :)