I love Kile/Kate/KWrite but I have cloud syncing that can't be paused and the "disable swap file syncing" option does not work. (See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=258897 for others having this problem.) As such, with every character change in the document, whether saved or not, the swap file is synced to the cloud. This equates to CONSTANT syncing while editing, both bad for upstream bandwidth and battery life.

Question: Are there any good KDE text editors that don't use katepart and don't sync to a swap file like this? (Those with latex markup most welcome!)

Thanks!

Unfortunately both KWrite and Kate use katepart - or the same underlying libraries.
To my knowledge, there is no other KDE text editors around - you might find one on kde-apps.org possibly.

There's another bug now that prevents me from using Katepart editors--this one: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=256561

For those looking for an alternative, give notepadqq a try. It's qt5 (so one gets native smooth scrolling), font rendering is awesome, and has extensive syntax highlighting. There's also a ppa for the latest stable Ubuntu.