The Kate toolbar that is given to me in the default install of openSUSE 12l1, KDE4.8, consists of three independent parts, the Kate main toolbar, the Kate file tree plugin toolbar, and the KatePartView toolbar. These are configured separately in the "Configure Toolbar" window and for each individual toolbar, you can change the order the icons appear. But how do you order the toolbars themselves? It seems that the icons are jumbled together at random.

Now when I click the "close" button to close an individually opened file, the icons rearrange! At complete random. Whenever I closed a while, there would be a new random order. The icons would stay consistent within the individual toolbar element, but change the relation to icons of another toolbar. Here's a demonstration:

From what I can tell - you cannot change the order of the toolbars. I suspect Kate itself uses a technology called "xmlgui merge" which allows these toolbars to be merged together in this way - however this usually leaves an indicator in the toolbar editor.

You probably want to ask about this on the Kate development mailing list, as this behaviour is not standard for a KDE application: kwrite-devel@kde.org

The sad news is, that this bug indeed exists for like ~14 years...

The good news is, that dfaure fixed it June 2016. The fix will be in KDE Frameworks 5.24 (namely the KXmlGui framework).

Code review: https://phabricator.kde.org/D1924
Fixed Bug: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64754
Code Commit: http://commits.kde.org/kxmlgui/cfb9d192 ... 248176c7c8

So if you update to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5, the icons will *not* be rearranged anymore