Hello. I have been having some mostly minor problems with the text editor Kate.

1. Solved: Messages concerning lines being too long in a document were received after opening a document in some version of Kate; the document was set by Kate to be in "read-only" mode. Then one can't edit that document! From viewtopic.php?f=224&t=101981 on the Internet I obtained partial instructions on what to do to solve this problem. My notes show that this is what worked for me: In Kate's "Settings" menu I selected "Configure Kate." Then on the "General" tab and under "Editor Component," perhaps also under or within "Open/Save," I changed the line length limit to 0. Previously it was 1024 or 1,024, I suppose characters. Then I clicked on both the "Apply" and "OK" buttons. I might have had to do some more clicking to get out of Kate's "Settings" menu; but if so, I did not write any of those steps down on paper. Also on the "General" tab I have a check mark in the check box beside "Dynamic Word Wrap", which I think is supposed to keep long lines from going too far to the right in an open Kate document. I think these changes were sufficient to enable editing a Kate document. And after closing both a Kate document and stopping Kate itself, then later restarting Kate and opening a document in Kate the message about lines being too long and the document being in "read-only" mode were gratefully not seen; and I could perform some edits of such a document, excluding the editing problems discussed below..

2. Unsolved: In a Kate document sometimes the "Replace" function of Kate did not work completely correctly. For example in searching for something to be replaced by "\alpha " or "\alpha", the backslash "\" in "\alpha" was not pasted in along with "alpha" in the replacement. In another replacement I think there was an added character pasted in to the right of a "\" that I did not have on my "Replace" line for the replacement.

3. Solvable: Sometimes an underscore character was not visible in a Kate document. Even after copying and pasting an underscore that was visible somewhere else in the Kate document into the troublesome location, the underscore was still not visible in the location where the pasting was performed. Eventually after inserting one or more blank lines and retyping some text including a new underscore, the underscore could be made visible in the desired location.

4. Solvable: Gratefully I can input either Latin or Roman characters used in the English language or simplified Mandarin Chinese characters in an openSUSE-12.2, Linux operating system (In openSUSE 12.2 I have English set as the primary language and something close to simplified Mandarin Chinese as the secondary language. And I use an input method editor to input the simplified Mandarin Chinese characters via their pinyin romanizations.). I think the blank space may be longer in the simplified-Mandarin Chinese-language mode than in the English-language mode. I think this sort of thing may have caused strange-looking characters to appear in a .html (HyperText Markup Language) document viewed in a Web browser after that .html document was produced by execution on a Kate, .tex, 8-bit Uniform Transformation Format (UTF-8) file of the combination of the programs LaTeX and LaTeX2HTML. The solution was to find to the longer-than-normal-looking blank space or spaces and in the English-language mode to eliminate it or them and enter the blank space or spaces.

5. A "workaround" solution exists, as described here: Sometimes I think it was hard to type or get the cursor to be located at characters near the right end of a line in a Kate document. But at a location some characters to the left of the problematic area after pressing the equivalent of the return or enter key on my computer's keyboard some characters originally located to the right of that point were placed on a new line; and there the cursor could be positioned normally and/or edits of the text could be made.

Question 1: Are problems similar to those I described above in items 2, 3, and 5 problems other people have been having using Kate 3.8.5 in KDE 4.8.5 "release 2"?

Question 2: If yes is your answer to question 1, have you observed similar problems in the similar text editor KWrite in KDE 4.8.5 "release 2?" I think I observed problem 1 in KWrite after fixing it in Kate. So I presume I should do something similar to what I did in Kate, only in KWrite, to fix the problem of being unable to edit a document in the text editor KWrite.

Hi!

For problem 1, this limit was once set for performance reasons. It might not have been the wisest decision ever, and it has been revised since. The limit has been significantly increased in newer versions of kate.

2: Make sure you don't have the replacement code set to "Escape Sequences".

3: No idea about this one. Does saving the document and opening it in another editor make the underscore show up?

4: I'm not sure I understood this one correctly, however it does not necessarily sound like it was related to kate. I can't say much, tough, so you might want to report a bug on this one if you're unsure.

5: Kate sometimes does weird things when RTL (right-to-left) languages are involved. Maybe that's related...

For KWrite, regarding the editor it's the same application like kate. So, all the issues you described should be pretty much the same in KWrite and in kate.

Greetings,
Sven

Thanks, Sven, for kindly taking the time to reply to me! Your mentioning "Escape sequences" eventually got me on a good "track" which gratefully led to solving my item 2 that I posted in my initial posting in this "thread." But first, sorry, it appears I was slightly inaccurate in writing that in trying to replace something with "\alpha " or "\alpha" that the found text was replaced by a character in addition to "\" and "alpha" or "alpha ". In fact it was replaced by a strange character looking like a degree symbol in a temperature followed by "lpha" and possibly a space, depending on whether I typed one there in the first place or not.

Another point is that within Kate after clicking on "Help" then "About Kate" I saw version 3.8.5. But in Yet another Software Tool 2's (YaST2's) "Software Management" after entering "Kate" in a search box or edit control the software package "kate 4.8.5-2.4.3" was reported found. Deleting that software package and then reinstalling it did not solve my problem in item 2.

But in an open Kate document I think simultaneously pressing the "ctrl" and "R" keys opened Kate's "Find" and "Replace" edit controls. Below those edit controls I saw "Mode" with it selected to "Regular expression" in the drop-down list box. By experiment I found that when either "Regular expression" or "Escape sequences" was selected that on attempting to replace some text with "\alpha" the actual replacing character string was the "degree"-looking symbol followed by "lpha". But after I instead selected "Plain text" in the drop-down list box beside "Mode:" I had text replaced by "\alpha", gratefully just as I desired. So gratefully it appears that is my solution to my item 2. The section "B.1 Introduction" of The Kate Handbook" at http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/kde-basea ... e/kate.pdf on the Internet gives an example of what is meant by a "regular expression." But I think the "Plain text" mode for a "Find" and "Replace" should be adequate for me in most situations using the text editor Kate.

If in the future I observe the missing underscore in a Kate document, I should remember to try opening that same document in another text editor, like you suggested for my item 3, to see if that underscore is missing in that second text editor or not. On my item 5 simplified Mandarin Chinese characters on a horizontal line are typically written from left to right. Thanks, Sven, for kindly taking some time to write your ideas here! It is nice to find people like you in this world who are willing to help other people! Thanks again, Sven!

The underscore thingy is a drawing bug that depends on the font size and the font. Interestingly, I've even seen it recently in the chrome browser.
It's hard to fix, and maybe even a bug in the font itself. As workaround, choose another font or increase/decrease the font size.