Is it really not possible to turn of the 'helpful' features in kwrite? Particularly syntax highlighting, which I have always found distracting to the point where I simply choose another editor, but also other features, like spell-checking - but mercifully, there is usually a way to get rid of that. I know there are many programmers who think it is crucial to have this sort of crutches, but believe it or not, we are not a few who feel that it solves a problem that could be better adressed simply by learning a tiny bit of discipline - something that would benefits people's ability to code well. So, is there a way to get rid of syntax highlighting (that doesn't involve going through hundreds of options in a poorly designed, graphical interface)?

janpla wrote:So, is there a way to get rid of syntax highlighting (that doesn't involve going through hundreds of options in a poorly designed, graphical interface)?

Select Highlighting->None in the "Tools" menu.

And spell checking is turned OFF by default anyway, here at least.

wolfi323, thank you for answering

Select Highlighting->None in the "Tools" menu.

Not in the one I have, it seems (ver 4.8.3).

what about in Fonts & Colors in settings, try setting Highlighting Text Styles to none

janpla wrote:wolfi323, thank you for answering

Select Highlighting->None in the "Tools" menu.

Not in the one I have, it seems (ver 4.8.3).

Well, 4.8.3 is old, but this has been there in the KDE3 version already (I just checked), so look again.

There is a "Highlighting" submenu in the "Tools" menu, select "None" there to disable syntax highlighting for the current file.


AFAIK, there is no simple on/off switch for highlighting in general, but you could try to make the "Normal" filetype apply to all files by setting the "File extensions" to * in the settings (Open/Save->Modes & Filetypes) and/or changing the Priority...
PS: this doesn't seem to be possible either, but you could create a new filetype (with "File extensions" set to *, and setting highlighting to "None"), that has a higher priority than all existing ones.

I can assure you, I don't see anything like what you show - I can only assume Debian for some reason comes with a build that somehow restricts the options. I can't guess why anyone would do a thing like that, but it is now beginning to feel like work, and it isn't all that important to me. I normally prefer vi, but sometimes it is handy to have a GUI based editor to dump text in, while you collect notes and scraps of text.

Thank you for trying to help, and well done for net getting sarcastic in the face of what must have seemed like a fantastic amount of incompetence on my part

[quote="janpla"]I can assure you, I don't see anything like what you show - I can only assume Debian for some reason comes with a build that somehow restricts the options.[/quote]
Well, what exactly do [i]you[/i] see?
Is the menu bar missing completely, don't you have a "Tools" menu, or is there no "Highlighting" submenu?

You could try to create a new "default" filetype as I described anyway, this should turn off highlighting completely (and you could still turn it on manually if you had that "Highlighting" submenu...)

what about / why not Kate?

google01103: Why not Kate? Well, when I need an editor for programming, it is always vi - and standard vi, at that, not vim. This is because I live across many UNIXes, and don't have vim everywhere; also being old, I have got used to vi long ago, and it suits me.

wolfi323: I would have grabbed a picture, but every time I try with KSnapshot, the menu disappears; there is probably a way, but I just haven't figured it out. I do see the Tools menu, there just isn't any highlighting item. Actually, my Tools menu doesn't list several of the items you show. Anyway, it isn't too much of a problem, I just don't light the colour show; it reminds me of too many wasted years of my youth in unsavoury neighborhoods around Soho in London

kate and kwrite are pretty much the same except for tabs and plugins - you could look at kate as being a superset of kwrite

to get ksnapshot to capture pulldowns you need to add a snapshot delay

Maybe you accidentially hid the menu bar by pressing Ctrl+M? Debian certainly has not removed the main manu bar from their kate build.

There used to be a setting (that seems to have been removed in 4.10, so it is probably available in your version) to turn on/off advanced menus, called "Enable power user (KDE3) mode". As I recall the syntax/highlighting mode was one of the "power user mode" menu items.

Of course changing the highlighting mode in this way only changes it for the current session with the current document and not for all documents nor is it rembered if you close and open the document (which is what I believe you want).

To always disable highlighting, I would suggest going with wolfi323's solution of making an overriding file type so that regardless of the type of the file it uses this override.