Kate vs NumenText

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.

NumenText is a terminal-based IDE written in Go, with a non-modal, menu-driven editor for people who want an IDE in the terminal without learning Vim or modal editing. It has multiple tabs, familiar shortcuts, and syntax highlighting for more than 20 languages. Build and run shortcuts cover C, C++, Go, Rust, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, and Kotlin. Its LSP client provides autocomplete, go-to-definition, hover information, and diagnostics; its DAP client supports breakpoints and step-by-step debugging. A test runner handles output from go test, pytest, cargo test, Maven, and Gradle, alongside configurable formatters and linters. Other tools include an integrated PTY terminal, regex search and replace, Markdown preview, a hex viewer and editor, bookmarks, TODO/FIXME scanning, and Git diff markers. It runs on macOS and Linux and is available free under Apache License 2.0. The project describes it as a single binary without runtime dependencies; compiling from source requires Go 1.25 or later.