Kate offers vertical block selection as a toggleable state. I.e. one has to press a shortcut to enable it. Is there a way to make it more similar to Geany and some other editors, where the behavior is triggered by some key being pressed constantly? I.e. in Geany in order to select text normally one can use Shift + Arrow in any direction (Kate works the same). And block selection is simply done with Alt + Shift + Arrow. Does Kate allow anything like that? Such method looks more natural and easier to use than a trigger.

I also tried to assign that trigger to Alt + Shift to make it more similar to Geany, but Kate expects some other key in addition.

The Alt + Shift issue is due to how Qt/KDE treats keyboard keys - Alt, Control, Meta (Windows) and Shift are all "modifier" keys and thus can't be shortcuts by themselves.

I'm afraid you'll need to make a feature request to the Kate developers to get the block selection behaviour you're after.

I did the same but still I am not able to modify it.

Can you post a link to the feature request you made?

Sorry, didn't have a chance to file it yet, I'll do it shortly.

Here is the feature request: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=340778

That's probably a one single feature that makes me use Geany rather than Kate when I need a GUI editor. I'd switch to Kate right away if it would have supported Alt+Shift+arrow block selection.