Episode: 1840
Title: HPR1840: Running external commands in Kate
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1840/hpr1840.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:58:00

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This is HPR episode 1,840 entitled Running External Command in Kate.
It is hosted by Ken Fallon and is about 4 minutes long.
The summary is using the text filter option in the Kate text editor.
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Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon and today I want to give you a quick tip about the
Kate text editor, so K-A-T-E Kilo Alpha Tango Echo.
It is a text editor that comes with KDE, I don't know 100% sure if it's the fault, but
it's definitely one that I install pretty much in every computer.
It doesn't seem to text them that much, it's a kind of lightweight enough text editor.
But it has a few things that for me makes it absolutely fantastic.
One of those is the ability to do search and replace.
For example, you go control or find replace and at the bottom it's got to replace words
or plain text, so slash N would replace anything with slash N. Escape sequences would replace
slash N would treat that as a new line and you can do regular expressions, but that's
not actually what I want to talk to you about today.
If you go into tools, if you actually hold down control and the backslash key, it pops
up the text filter option.
What that will allow you to do is enter commands on the highlighted text, so if you've highlighted
a series of lines and you want it sorted, so then you can press control and backslash
and type sort, and it will sort that list for you within the text editor.
That might not be that interesting to you, but what you basically can do is then you
say doc and grep and other programs within your text, within the text file that you're
working on, and that is actually really rather awesome.
So if I'm looking down my history here, I have oc, space, dash, capital F, quote, forward
slash, quote, space, quote, open squiggly bracket, print space, dollar three, close squiggly
bracket, single quote again.
And what that one does is this will print out the third line of a column.
So this is handy if you open up a text file, a log file or something, and you think and
grep for the word error for error, or for instance, and then you determine what the format
is, you're only interested in finding the identifiers, and that's in column three.
So then you can run alkanat and it's just handier than having to save it out and then
build your pipeline.
This is kind of an easy way to do it.
It also though, with that option, you have the option to emerge standard output and standard
error, or you have the option to copy the results, so it goes into your keyboard and
are into your clipboard and is available for all the stuff.
So to enable that, sometimes it gets disabled from time to time after an update and I struggle
to find out where it is.
So the reason I'm doing this show is so I will know that I've done a show about it and
I can go back and find out where to turn it back on and how you turn it back on settings
and configure Kate and then go into under applications plugins and the plugin you need
to re-enable is text filter and the comment is easy text filtering.
There are all sorts of things that you can turn on for plugins.
There's plugins and extensions, I'm not 100% sure what the difference between the two
is.
One is an application component and the other is an editor component, but I'm sure it
makes sense to the guys.
The one I use from time to time is XML validation, but to be honest, I prefer to do that straight
on the command line.
So that's a small tip, text filtering in your text editor.
If your text editor of choice does something similar to this and if you've known about
this for years, feel free to record a show because it might be obvious to everybody how
to enable it in their show.
Anyway, tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
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