# Configuring &kate;

## Overview

&kate; offers several means of tweaking the application to behave as desired. The most important ones are:

The Configuration Dialog

- The main configuration tool, allowing you to configure the &kate; application, the editor component and the usage of plugins.

The Settings Menu

- Allows you to change often used settings, and to launch the configuration dialogs.

The View Menu

- Allows you to split the current frame, as well as to display the icons and line numbers pane for the currently edited document.

The embedded terminal uses the configuration defined in the &systemsettings;, and may also be configured by clicking the &RMB; to display a context menu.

## The Main Configuration Dialog

The &kate; configuration dialog displays a tree of topics on the left, and a configuration page corresponding to the selected topic on the right.

The configuration is divided into two groups, namely:

- Application configuration

- Editor component configuration

## The &kate; Application Configuration

This group contains pages to configure the main &kate; application

### General

This section contains a few global options for &kate;

Behavior

- Open each document in its own window

- If enabled, each document will be opened in its own window. If not enabled, each document will be opened in a new tab in the current window.

Switch to output view upon message type

- This option allows configuring when &kate; should show an output pane depending on the type of action output.

  It is possible to choose between Never, Error (on error), Warning (on warning or above), Info (on info or above), and Log (on log or above).

Use a separate dialog for handling externally modified files

- When enabled, &kate; will notify you with a modal dialog about all files modified from outside the application whenever the main window receives input focus. You will be able to deal with several modified files at once, you can reload, save or discard changed files in groups.

  If not enabled, &kate; will individually ask you what to do for each modified file only when that file's view receives focus.

Quick Open

- Match Mode

- Set the list mode for the Quick Open tool. The files can be matched by their name or by their path.

List Mode

- Set the list mode for the Quick Open tool. It is possible to choose from Current Project Files and All Projects Files.

Tabs

- Limit number of tabs

- Set the maximum number of tabs. Choose Unlimited if you do not want to restrict this number.

Auto hide tabs

- When checked tabs will be hidden if only one document is open.

Show close button

- When checked each tab will display a close button.

Expand tabs

- When checked tabs take as much size as possible.

Double click opens a new document

- When checked double click opens a new document.

Middle click closes a document

- When checked middle click closes a document.

Allow tab scrolling

- When checked this will allow scrolling in tab bar when number of tabs is large.

Elide tab text

- When checked tab text might be elided if its too long.

Tabs

- Backward button pressed

- Allows selecting the mouse back button action between the Previous tab and the History back items.

Forward button pressed

- Allows selecting the mouse forward button action between the Next tab and the History forward items.

### Session

This section contains options related to using sessions.

Application Startup Behavior

- Select how you want &kate; to behave at startup. This setting can be overridden by specifying what to do on the command line.

  Start new session

- With this option, &kate; will start a new, unnamed session when you start the application.

Load last-used session

- &kate; will use the most recently opened session at startup. This is good if you want to use the same session always or switch rarely.

Manually choose a session

- &kate; will display a small dialog that lets you choose your preferred session, or load the default session if none have been saved. This is the default behavior. Nice if you use a lot of different sessions frequently.

Application Startup/Shutdown Behavior

- Select how you want &kate; to behave at shutdown. It is possible to define what &kate; should Automatically save and restore.

  Newly-created unsaved files

- With this item checked, &kate; will automatically save all newly-created unsaved files.

Files with unsaved changes

- This item allows configuring &kate; for automatically saving all files with unsaved changes on shutdown.

Close Kate entirely when the last file is closed

- If enabled, &kate; will shutdown when the last file being edited is closed, otherwise a blank page will open so that you can start a new file.

Session Elements

- Include window configuration

- If enabled, &kate; will save the window configuration with each session.

Keep meta-information past sessions

- When enabled, &kate; will store meta data such as bookmarks and session configuration even when you close your documents. The data will be used if the document is unchanged when reopened.

Delete unused meta-information after

- Set the maximum number of days to keep meta information for previously opened files. This helps keep the database of meta information reasonably sized.

Any changes to the session data (opened files and, if enabled, window configuration) will always be saved.

### Plugins

This page provides a list of installed plugins for the &kate; application. Each plugin is represented with its name and a short description. You can check the checkbox with an item to enable the plugin it represents.

If a plugin provides configuration options, a section to access those will appear as a child of this page.

For more information about the available plugins, see plugins.

### The Editor Component Configuration

For information about this section of the configuration dialog, see the Editor Component Configuration section of the &katepart; Handbook.

### Configuring With Document Variables

For information about using document variables with &kate;, see the Configuring with Document Variables section of the &katepart; Handbook.