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It will been handy to add textual tools to text editor's components (and make them some think like text processor ).
If not, it will been still handy to add this possibility to Kate/Kwrite.

Textual tools are text-based tool, which will work similar to console commands (reading input and giving output).

It will uses selected text as an input(pipe) and will displays output in a separate window(only text). User might choose to copy it or to click on paste instead a selection.

They also can get optional arguments.

Use case:
- Putting current date, ls of directory(argument), ps
- Sort a data
- Converts HTML convention < > onto [ ] and a lots of conversions
- Wikipedia urls generators
- CodePut helper
- Displaying a man page
- Advanced search

I think also, that we can makes easier to use by allowing to define destination(by selecting control or some key, selecting text and click mouse on destination place).

I know, that Kate allows to direct text onto pipe, but this functionality isn't usable.

Kate has an External Tools plugin that allows you to run scripts using an external program (http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/kdesdk/ka ... ialog.html)
One thing that could be nice with this is a repository of useful scripts.

This could conceivably be moved from a Kate plugin to the text component and all of these suggested text tools be implemented as External Tools scripts.

I have wrote about more generic approach, for example using console tools.

Looking at the External Tools - it allows you to use console tools in the scripts; that is, you can set the executable to sh or bash to run shell scripts, or what have you. See the link (or google "Kate External Tools") for more information. My suggestion is that one way to fulfill your request would be to move the External Tools Kate plugin to the base editor component - thus providing the scripting functionality to anything using the editor component.

Or are you referring to providing a KDE collection of console tools for manipulating text that can be linked to the text editor component?

Yes. Using tools like date, sort, uniq, join could been great, even for KOffice suite.