Fresh vs Kate
Fresh
getfresh.dev
Kate
kate-editor.orgSide by side
| Figure | Fresh | Kate |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Rust IDEs | 8.0 (#6) | 8.1 (#4) |
| Spec score · Text Editors | 7.9 (#46) | 8.5 (#14) |
| Plugins | Plugins are written in TypeScript and run sandboxed inside Fresh’s single binary. | Listed plugins include an embedded terminal, SQL, build, GDB and Replace in Files plugins. |
| Privacy | Fresh sends anonymous telemetry consisting of its version, operating system and architecture, and terminal type; the maker says it collects no personal data, file contents, or usage behavior. | KDE says its software generally does not transfer information from users’ devices except after explicit user action; any telemetry is opt-in and disabled by default. |
| Product | Fresh is a modern terminal IDE and text editor designed to work alongside a full IDE and to drive coding agents. | Kate is a text editor for viewing and editing text files. |
| Support | The site links to Discord, GitHub Issues, and GitHub Discussions for community contact and support. | Kate support is offered through its KDE Discuss section, Matrix channel and KDE bug tracker. |
Plans
In their own words
Fresh
Fresh is a free, open-source terminal IDE and text editor designed to work alongside a full IDE and drive coding agents. Its Orchestrator gives each task its own Git worktree, tabs, terminals, and agent. Fresh can run terminal agents including Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode, or a command supplied by the user. Workspaces can run locally, over SSH, in Kubernetes, or in a dev container. Git review tools include hunk-level staging, unstaging, and discarding, side-by-side diffs, and notes exportable to Markdown. Editing features include multi-cursor support, keyboard macros, Vim mode, regex search and replace, and project-wide search. Fresh supports multiple language servers per language and lists configurations for Python, TypeScript, Rust, Go, Java, C/C++, and Ruby, among others. Its integrated terminal offers multiple tabs and split placement. The product page says Fresh can open multi-gigabyte files without blocking the interface. Plugins are written in TypeScript and run sandboxed inside Fresh’s single binary.
Kate
Kate is a free text editor for viewing and editing text files on Linux, macOS and Windows. It can show multiple documents in horizontally or vertically split windows, and supports multi-cursor and column editing. For code and other structured text, Kate provides syntax highlighting for over 400 languages, bracket matching and on-the-fly spell checking. Programming tools include auto-completion with argument hints, scriptable auto-indentation and Vi input mode; the editor uses the Language Server Protocol for auto-completion in many languages. Search and replace handles regular expressions, multiline searches, open files and files on disk. Listed plugins include an embedded terminal, SQL, build, GDB and Replace in Files tools. Kate can open remote files and supports Unicode and other encodings. Backups on save and swap files can help recover data after a system crash. The editor is free, and its listed plan describes it as available for Linux, Windows and macOS. Nightly packages are compiled daily, but may be unstable or incomplete and are recommended for testing.