# The Editor Component Configuration

This group contains all pages related to the editor component of &kappname;. Most of the settings here are defaults, they can be overridden by defining a filetype, by Document Variables or by changing them per document during an editing session.

## Appearance

### General

Dynamic Word Wrap

- If this option is checked, the text lines will be wrapped at the view border on the screen.

  Dynamic word wrap indicators (if applicable)

- Choose when the Dynamic word wrap indicators should be displayed, either Off, Follow Line Numbers or Always on.

Align dynamically wrapped lines to indentation depth:

- Enables the start of dynamically wrapped lines to be aligned vertically to the indentation level of the first line. This can help to make code and markup more readable.

  Additionally, this allows you to set a maximum width of the screen, as a percentage, after which dynamically wrapped lines will no longer be vertically aligned. For example, at 50%, lines whose indentation levels are deeper than 50% of the width of the screen will not have vertical alignment applied to subsequent wrapped lines.

Whitespace Highlighting

- Highlight tabulators

- The editor will display a » symbol to indicate the presence of a tab in the text.

Highlight trailing spaces

- The editor will display dots to indicate the presence of extra whitespace at the end of lines.

Advanced

- Show indentation lines

- If this is checked, the editor will display vertical lines to help identifying indent lines.

Highlight range between selected brackets

- If this is enabled, the range between the selected matching brackets will be highlighted.

### Borders

Borders

- Show folding markers (if available)

- If this option is checked, the current view will display marks for code folding, if code folding is available.

Show icon border

- If this is checked, you will see an icon border on the left hand side. The icon border shows bookmark signs for instance.

Show line numbers

- If this is checked, you will see line numbers on the left hand side.

Show line modification markers

- If this is checked, line modification markers will be visible. For more information, see kate-part-line-modification.

Show scrollbar marks

- If this option is checked the current view will show marks on the vertical scrollbar. These marks will for instance show bookmarks.

Show scrollbar mini-map

- If this option is checked, every new view will show a mini map of the whole document on the vertical scrollbar.

  For more information on the scrollbar minimap, see kate-part-scrollbar-minimap

Minimap Width

- Adjusts the width of the scrollbar mini-map, defined in pixels.

Sort Bookmarks Menu

- By creation

- Each new bookmark will be added to the bottom, independently from where it is placed in the document.

By position

- The bookmarks will be ordered by the line numbers they are placed at.

## Fonts & Colors

This section of the dialog lets you configure all fonts and colors in any color scheme you have, as well creating new schemes or deleting existing ones. Each scheme has settings for colors, fonts and normal and highlight text styles.

&kappname; will preselect the currently active scheme for you, if you want to work on a different scheme start by selecting that from the Schema combobox. With the New and Delete button you can create a new scheme or delete existing ones.

At the bottom of the page you can select the Default schema for &kappname;.

By default, &kappname; will base its color scheme on the current &kde; color scheme. You can reset an individual color back to default by clicking the reset arrow to the right of the entry in the color editor, or you can reset all colors back to default by clicking the Use &kde; Color Scheme at the bottom of the panel.

You can adjust the &kde; color scheme in the Colors module in &systemsettings;.

### Colors

Editor Background Colors

- Text Area

- This is the default background for the editor area, it will be the dominant color on the editor area.

Selected Text

- This is the background for selected text. The default is the global selection color, as set in your &kde; color preferences.

Current Line

- Set the color for the current line. Setting this a bit different from the Normal text background helps to keep focus on the current line.

Search Highlight

- Set the color for the text that matches your last search.

Replace Highlight

- Set the color for the text that matches your last replace operation.

Icon Border

- Background Area

- This color is used for the marks, line numbers and folding marker borders in the left side of the editor view when they are displayed.

Line Numbers

- This color is used to draw the line numbers on the left side of the view when displayed.

Word Wrap Marker

- This color is used to draw a pattern to the left of dynamically wrapped lines when those are aligned vertically, as well as for the static word wrap marker.

Code Folding

- This color is used to highlight the section of code that would be folded when you click on the code folding arrow to the left of a document. For more information, see the code folding documentation.

Modified Lines

- This color is used to highlight to the left of a document lines that have been modified but not yet saved. For more information, see kate-part-line-modification

Saved Lines

- This color is used to highlight to the left of a document lines that have been modified this session and saved. For more information, see kate-part-line-modification

Text Decorations

- Spelling Mistake Line

- This color is used to indicate spelling mistakes.

Tab and Space Markers

- This color is used to draw white space indicators, when they are enabled.

Indentation Line

- This color is used to draw a line to the left of indented blocks, if that feature is enabled.

Bracket Highlight

- This color is used to draw the background of matching brackets.

Marker Colors

- Bookmark

- This color is used to indicate bookmarks. For more information, see kate-part-bookmarks.

Active Breakpoint

- This color is used by the GDB plugin to indicate an active breakpoint. For more information, see the GDB Plugin documentation.

Reached Breakpoint

- This color is used by the GDB plugin to indicate a breakpoint you have reached while debugging. For more information, see the GDB Plugin documentation.

Disabled Breakpoint

- This color is used by the GDB plugin to indicate an inactive breakpoint. For more information, see the GDB Plugin documentation.

Execution

- This color is used by the GDB plugin the line presently being executed. For more information, see the GDB Plugin documentation.

Warning

- This color is used by the build plugin to indicate a line that has caused a compiler warning. For more information, see the Build Plugin documentation.

Error

- This color is used by the build plugin to indicate a line that has caused a compiler error. For more information, see the Build Plugin documentation.

Text Templates & Snippets

- Background

- This color is used by the &kate; Snippets plugin to mark the background of a snippet. For more information, see the &kate; Snippets documentation.

Editable Placeholder

- This color is used by the &kate; Snippets plugin to mark a placeholder that you can click in to edit manually. For more information, see the &kate; Snippets documentation.

Focused Editable Placeholder

- This color is used by the &kate; Snippets plugin to mark the placeholder that you are presently editing. For more information, see the &kate; Snippets documentation.

Not Editable Placeholder

- This color is used by the &kate; Snippets plugin to mark a placeholder that cannot be edited manually, such as one that is automatically populated. For more information, see the &kate; Snippets documentation.

### Font

Here you can choose the font for the schema. You can choose from any font available on your system, and set a default size. A sample text displays at the bottom of the dialog, so you can see the effect of your choices.

For more information about selecting a font, see the Choosing Fonts section of the &kde; Fundamentals documentation.

### Default Text Styles

The default text styles are inherited by the highlight text styles, allowing the editor to present text in a very consistent way, for example comment text is using the same style in almost all of the text formats that &kappname; can highlight.

The name in the list of styles is using the style configured for the item, providing you with an immediate preview when configuring a style.

Each style lets you select common attributes as well as foreground and background colors. To unset a background color, rightclick to use the context menu.

### Highlighting Text Styles

Here you can edit the text styles used by a specific highlight definition. The editor preselects the highlight used by your current document. To work on a different highlight, select one in the Highlight combobox above the style list.

The name in the list of styles is using the style configured for the item, providing you with an immediate preview when configuring a style.

Each style lets you select common attributes as well as foreground and background colors. To unset a background color, rightclick to use the context menu. In addition you can see if a style is equal to the default style used for the item, and set it to that if not.

You will notice that many highlights contain other highlights represented by groups in the style list. For example most highlights import the Alert highlight, and many source code formats imports the Doxygen highlight. Editing colors in those groups only affects the styles when used in the edited highlight format.

## Editing

### General

Static Word Wrap

- Word wrap is a feature that causes the editor to automatically start a new line of text and move (wrap) the cursor to the beginning of that new line. &kappname; will automatically start a new line of text when the current line reaches the length specified by the Wrap Words At: option.

  Enable static word wrap

- Turns static word wrap on or off.

Show static word wrap markers (if applicable)

- If this option is checked, a vertical line will be drawn at the word wrap column as defined in the Settings Configure Editor... in the Editing tab. Please note that the word wrap marker is only drawn if you use a fixed pitch font.

Wrap words at:

- If the Enable static word wrap option is selected this entry determines the length (in characters) at which the editor will automatically start a new line.

Misc

- Copy/Cut the current line if no selection

- If this option is enabled and the text selection is empty, copy and cut action are performed for the line of text at the actual cursor position.

### Text Navigation

Text Cursor Movement

- Smart home and smart end

- When selected, pressing the home key will cause the cursor to skip white space and go to the start of a line's text.

PageUp/PageDown moves cursor

- This option changes the behavior of the cursor when the user presses the Page Up or Page Down key. If unselected the text cursor will maintain its relative position within the visible text in &kappname; as new text becomes visible as a result of the operation. So if the cursor is in the middle of the visible text when the operation occurs it will remain there (except when one reaches the beginning or end.) With this option selected, the first key press will cause the cursor to move to either the top or bottom of the visible text as a new page of text is displayed.

Autocenter cursor (lines):

- Sets the number of lines to maintain visible above and below the cursor when possible.

Text Selection Mode

- Normal

- Selections will be overwritten by typed text and will be lost on cursor movement.

Persistent

- Selections will stay even after cursor movement and typing.

Allow scrolling past the end of the document

- This option lets you scroll past the end of the document. This can be used to vertically centre the bottom of the document, or put it on top of the current view.

### Indentation

Default Indentation mode:

- Select the automatic indentation mode you want to use as default. It is strongly recommended to use `None` or `Normal` here, and use filetype configurations to set other indentation modes for text formats like C/C++ code or &XML;.

Indent using

- Tabulators

- When this is enabled the editor will insert tabulator characters when you press the key or use automatic indentation.

Spaces

- When this is enabled the editor will insert a calculated number of spaces according to the position in the text and the `tab-width` setting when you press the key or use automatic indentation.

Tabulators and Spaces

- When this is enabled, the editor will insert spaces as describe above when indenting or pressing at the beginning of a line, but insert tabulators when the key is pressed in the middle or end of a line.

Tab width:

- This configures the number of spaces that are displayed in place of a tabulator character.

Indentation width:

- The indentation width is the number of spaces which is used to indent a line. If configured to indent using tabulators, a tabulator character is inserted if the indentation is divisible by the tab width.

Indentation Properties

- Keep Extra Spaces

- If this option is disabled, changing the indentation level aligns a line to a multiple of the width specified in Indentation width.

Adjust indentation of code pasted from the clipboard

- If this option is selected, pasted code from the clipboard is indented. Triggering the Undo action removes the indentation.

Indentation Actions

- Backspace key in leading blank space unindents

- If this option is selected, the &Backspace; key decreases the indentation level if the cursor is located in the leading blank space of a line.

Tab key action (if no selection exists)

- If you want to align the current line in the current code block like in emacs, make a shortcut to the action Align.

  Always advance to the next tab position

- If this option is selected, the key always inserts white space so that the next tab position is reached. If the option Insert spaces instead of tabulators on the General tab in the Editing page is enabled, spaces are inserted; otherwise, a single tabulator is inserted.

Always increase indentation level

- If this option is selected, the key always indents the current line by the number of character positions specified in Indentation width.

Increase indentation level if in leading blank space

- If this option is selected, the key either indents the current line or advances to the next tab position. If the insertion point is at or before the first non-space character in the line, or if there is a selection, the current line is indented by the number of character positions specified in Indentation width. If the insertion point is located after the first non-space character in the line and there is no selection, white space is inserted so that the next tab position is reached: if the option Insert spaces instead of tabulators on the General tab in the Editing page is enabled, spaces are inserted; otherwise, a single tabulator is inserted.

### Auto Completion

General

- Enable auto completion

- If enabled, a word completion box automatically pops up during typing showing a list of text entries to complete the current text under the cursor.

Minimal word length to complete

- While typing text, the word completion searches for words in the document starting with the already typed text. This option configures the minimal amount of characters that are needed to make the word completion active and pop up a completion box.

### Vi Input Mode

General

- Use VI input mode

- When selected, the vi input mode will be enabled when opening a new view. You can still toggle the vi input mode on/off for a particular view in the Edit menu.

Let Vi commands override Kate shortcuts

- When selected, Vi commands will override &kappname;'s built-in commands. For example: &Ctrl;R will redo, and override the standard action (showing the search and replace dialog).

Hide the Vi mode status bar

- By default, an extra status bar will be used when the Vi input mode is enabled. This status bar shows commands while they are being typed and messages/errors produced by Vi commands.

  Checking this option will hide this extra status line.

Key Mapping

- Key mapping is used to change the meaning of typed keys. This allows you to move commands to other keys or make special keypresses for doing a series of commands.

  Example:

  F2 -> I-- &Esc;

  This will prepend I-- to a line when pressing F2.

### Spellcheck

These configuration options are described in the documentation for the &systemsettings; module Spell Checker.

## Open/Save

### General

File Format

- Encoding

- This defines the standard encoding to use to open/save files, if not changed in the open/save dialog or by using a command line option.

Encoding Detection

- Select an item from the drop down box, either to disable autodetection or use Universal to enable autodetection for all encodings. But as this may probably only detect utf-8/utf-16, selecting a region will use custom heuristics for better results. If neither the encoding chosen as standard above, nor the encoding specified in the open/save dialog, nor the encoding specified on command line match the content of the file, this detection will be run.

Fallback Encoding

- This defines the fallback encoding to try for opening files if neither the encoding chosen as standard above, nor the encoding specified in the open/ save dialog, nor the encoding specified on command line match the content of the file. Before this is used, an attempt will be made to determine the encoding to use by looking for a byte order marker at start of file: if one is found, the right unicode encoding will be chosen; otherwise encoding detection will run, if both fail fallback encoding will be tried.

End of line

- Choose your preferred end of line mode for your active document. You have the choice between &UNIX;, DOS/&Windows; or Macintosh.

Automatic end of line detection

- Check this if you want the editor to autodetect the end of line type. The first found end of line type will be used for the whole file.

Enable byte order marker

- The byte order mark is a special sequence at the beginning of unicode encoded documents. It helps editors to open text documents with the correct unicode encoding. For more information see Byte Order Mark.

Line Length Limit

- Unfortunately, due to deficiencies in &Qt;, &kappname; experiences poor performance when working with extremely long lines. For that reason, &kappname; will automatically wrap lines when they are longer than the number of characters specified here. To disable this, set this to `0`.

Automatic Cleanups on Load/Save

- Remove trailing spaces

- The editor will automatically eliminate extra spaces at the ends of lines of text while loading/saving the file.

Append newline at end of file on save

- The editor will automatically append a newline to the end of the file if one is not already present upon saving the file.

### Advanced

Folder Config File

- Search depth for config file:

- The editor will search the given number of folder levels upwards for &kappname; config file and load the settings line from it. Further information about these hidden folder config files you find in the document variables section.

Backup on Save

- Backing up on save will cause &kappname; to copy the disk file to <prefix><filename><suffix> before saving changes. The suffix defaults to ~ and prefix is empty by default.

  Local files

- Check this if you want backups of local files when saving.

Remote files

- Check this if you want backups of remote files when saving.

Prefix

- Enter the prefix to prepend to the backup file names.

Suffix

- Enter the suffix to add to the backup file names.

Disable swap file syncing

- &kappname; is able to recover (most of) what was written after last save in case of a crash or power failure. A swap file (.swp.<filename>) is created after the first editing action on a document. If the user doesn’t save the changes and &kappname; crashes, the swap file remains on the disk. When opening a file, &kappname; checks if there is a swap file for the document and if it is, it asks the user whether he wants to recover the lost data or not. The user has the possibility to view the differences between the original file and the recovered one, too. The swap file is deleted after every save and on normal exit.

  &kappname; syncs the swap files on the disk every 15 seconds, but only if they have changed since the last sync. The user can disable the swap files syncing if he wants, by checking the Disable swap file syncing box, but this can lead to more data loss.

### Modes & Filetypes

This page allows you to override the default configuration for documents of specified mimetypes. When the editor loads a document, it will try if it matches the file masks or mimetypes for one of the defined filetypes, and if so apply the variables defined. If more filetypes match, the one with the highest priority will be used.

Filetype:

- The filetype with the highest priority is the one displayed in the first drop down box. If more filetypes were found, they are also listed.

  New

- This is used to create a new filetype. After you click on this button, the fields below get empty and you can fill the properties you want for the new filetype.

Delete

- To remove an existing filetype, select it from the drop down box and press the Delete button.

Properties of `current filetype`

- The filetype with the highest priority is the one displayed in the first drop down box. If more filetypes were found, they are also listed.

  Name:

- The name of the filetype will be the text of the corresponding menu item. This name is displayed in the Tools Filetypes

Section:

- The section name is used to organize the file types in menus. This is also used in the Tools Filetypes menu.

Variables:

- This string allows you to configure &kappname;'s settings for the files selected by this mimetype using &kappname; variables. You can set almost any configuration option, such as highlight, indent-mode, etc.

  Press Edit to see a list of all available variables and their descriptions. Select the checkbox on the left to enable a particular variable and then set the value of the variable on the right. Some variables provide a drop-down box to select possible values from while others require you to enter a valid value manually.

  For complete information on these variables, see Configuring with Document Variables.

Highlighting:

- If you create a new file type, this drop down box allows you to select a filetype for highlighting.

Indentation Mode:

- The drop down box specifies the indentation mode for new documents.

File extensions:

- The wildcards mask allows you to select files by filename. A typical mask uses an asterisk and the file extension, for example `*.txt; *.text`. The string is a semicolon-separated list of masks.

MIME types:

- Displays a wizard that helps you easily select mimetypes.

Priority:

- Sets a priority for this file type. If more than one file type selects the same file, the one with the highest priority will be used.

Download Highlighting Files...

- Click this button to download new or updated syntax highlight descriptions from the &kappname; website.

## Extensions

The Extensions tab lists all available plugins and you can check those you want to use. Click on the Information button to open the About dialog of this plugin.

Once a configurable plugin is checked, the Configure button is enabled and you can click it in order to configure the highlighted plugin.

For more information on the available plugins, see editor-component-plugins.