I've a hard time figuring out when KDE save things/states for next time.

There are sometimes, but infrequently, applications that are restarted automatically when I start KDE, but kshutdown seems to have found its way to the system tray without any explicit action from me...

Kate is a big mystery to me. It usually saves things that are of little value like files accessed thru sftp:// so often no longer around (different network) when I start it later. And "open recent" sems to have a very short memory. At other times, after a day's work, starting Kate still brings the file I opened early in the morning, but not those I opened recently. Maybe I should dig into "sessions" but I would except a predictable behavior from the default session.

Is this explained somewhere?

I found after a recent install that I inadvertently had two default sessions in
/home/john/.kde4/share/apps/kate/sessions
You could start by looking there.

john_hudson wrote:I found after a recent install that I inadvertently had two default sessions in
/home/john/.kde4/share/apps/kate/sessions
You could start by looking there.

I have::

• Default%20Session.katesession
• default.katesession

The first seems to contains only a bunch of general settings. The second has a rather complete history of my editing activity

I deleted the first and that appeared to solve my problems; not sure if it will solve yours but it certainly hasn't done any damage to my setup.