GNOME Builder vs Kate

GNOME Builder is a free integrated development environment for creating applications for GNOME. It integrates GTK+, GLib, and GNOME APIs, with editing features that include syntax highlighting, side-by-side editors, multi-monitor support, and a code overview mini-map. Git integration includes project cloning, and listed build integrations cover Autotools, Cargo, CMake, Gradle, Meson, Maven, Make, PHPize, and Waf. Code assistance includes Clang- and Python-based auto-completion, semantic highlighting, and diagnostics, plus Vala-based auto-completion and diagnostics. Builder offers live previews for HTML, Markdown, reStructuredText, and Sphinx, as well as optional Vim, Emacs, and SublimeText-style editing. Native applications can use its integrated debugger and software profiler. It supports jhbuild and Flatpak runtimes and integrates with arduino-cli. The app page says releases follow the GNOME schedule, every six months, and links to online help, contribution guidance, and an issue tracker. Builder is available for Linux desktops, with x86_64 and aarch64 builds listed.

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.