Kate vs Neovim

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.

Neovim is a free, Vim-based text editor built for extensibility and usability. It keeps Vim’s editing model and Vimscript v1 support, while configuration lives in init.lua and users can create Lua plugins. Its documented, versioned API and RPC let developers build extensions in many languages; GUIs, IDEs, and web browsers can also embed Neovim. Tree-sitter supports syntax highlighting and text objects, and built-in language-server support provides semantic code inspection and refactoring. Editing tools include multicursor command replay, macro recording, column editing, and large-file handling. A built-in terminal includes modern terminal features. Neovim supports Vim 8.x plugins and more. Stable downloads are listed for Linux, macOS, and Windows, with x86_64 and arm64 builds for each. Windows 8 or newer is required; Windows 7 and older are unsupported. It is licensed under Apache 2.0, with exceptions for parts contributed under the Vim license. Community support is available through GitHub Discussions and vi.stackexchange.com.