Kate's editor component has an internal command line, allowing you to perform various actions from a minimal GUI. The command line is a text entry in the bottom of the editor area, to show it select -> or use the shortcut (default is F7). The editor provides a set of commands as documented below, and additional commands can be provided by plugins.
To execute a command, type the comand then press the return key. The command line will indicate wether it succeded and possibly display a message. If you entered the command line by pressing F7 it will automatically hide after a few seconds. To clear the message and enter a new command, press F7 again.
The command line has a built-in help system, issue the command
help to get started. To see a list of all available commands
issue help list, to view help for a specific command, do
help command
.
The command line has a built in history, so you can reuse commands already typed. To navigate the history, use the Up and Down keys. When showing historical commands, the argument part of the command will be selected, allowing you to easily overwrite the arguments.
These commands are provided by the editor component, and allows you to configure the active document and view only. This is handy if you want to use a setting different from the default settings, for example for indentation.
Argument types
This is used with commands that turns things on or off.
Legal values are on
, off
,
true
, false
,
1
or 0
An integer number
A string
set-tab-width [INTEGER width]
Sets the tab width to the number width
set-indent-width [INTEGER width]
Sets the indentation width to the number
width
. Used only if you are indenting with
spaces.
set-word-wrap-column [INTEGER width]
Sets the line width for hard wrapping to
width
. This is used if you are having your text wrapped
automatically.
set-icon-border [BOOLEAN enable]
Sets the visibility of the icon border.
set-folding-markers [BOOLEAN enable]
Sets the visibility of the folding markers pane.
set-line-numbers [BOOLEAN enable]
Sets the visibility of the line numbers pane.
set-replace-tabs [BOOLEAN enable]
If enabled, tabs are replaced with spaces as you type.
set-remove-trailing-space [BOOLEAN enable]
If enabled, trailing whitespace are removed whenever the cursor leaves a line.
set-show-tabs [BOOLEAN enable]
If enabled, TAB characters and trailing whitespace will be visualized by a small dot.
set-indent-spaces [BOOLEAN enable]
If enabled, the editor will indent with
indent-width
spaces for each indentation level, rather than
with one TAB character.
set-mixed-indent [BOOLEAN enable]
If enabled, kate will use a mix of TAB and spaces for
indentation. Each indentation level will be indent-width
wide,
and more indentation levels will be optimized to use as many TAB characters as
possible.
When executed, this command will additionally set space indentation enabled,
and if the indent width is unspecified it will be set to half of the
tab-width
for the document at the time of execution.
set-word-wrap [BOOLEAN enable]
Enables dynamic word wrap according to
enable
set-replace-tabs-save [BOOLEAN enable ]
When enabled, tabs will be replaced with whitespace whenever the document is saved.
set-remove-trailing-space-save [BOOLEAN enable]
When enabled, trailing space will be removed from each line whenever the document is saved.
set-indent-mode [name]
Sets the autoindentation mode to name
.
If name
is not known, the mode is set to 'none'. Valid
modes are 'cstyle', 'csands', 'xml', 'python', 'varindent' and 'none'.
set-highlight [highlight]
Sets the syntax highlighting system for the document. The argument must be a valid highlight name, as seen in the -> menu. This command provides an autocompletion list for its argument.
These commands modify the current document.
indent
Indents the selected lines or the current line.
unindent
Unindents the selected lines or current line.
cleanindent
Cleans up the indentation of the selected lines or current line according to the indentation settings in the document.
comment
Inserts comment markers to make the selection or selected lines or current line a comment according to the text format as defined by the syntax highlight definition for the document.
uncomment
Removes comment markers from the selection or selected lines or current line according to the text format as defined by the syntax highlight definition for the document.
kill-line
Deletes the current line.
replace [pattern] [replacement]
Replaces text matching pattern
with
replacement
. If you want to include whitespace in the
pattern
, you must quote both the pattern
and replacement
with single or double quotes. If the
arguments are unquoted, the first word is used as pattern
and the rest for replacement
. If
replacement
is empty, each occurrence of
pattern
is removed.
You can set flags to configure the search by adding a colon, followed
by one or more letters each representing a configuration, giving the form
replace:options pattern replacement
. Available options
are:
b
Search backwards.
c
Search from cursor position.
e
Search in the selection only.
r
Do regular expression search. If set, you may use
\N
where N is a number to represent captures in the
replacement string.
s
Do case sensitive search.
p
Prompt for permission to replace the next occurence.
w
Match whole words only.
date [format]
Inserts a date/time string as defined by the specified
format
, or the format “yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss”
if none is specified. The following translations are done when interpreting
format
:
d | The day as number without a leading zero (1-31). |
dd | The day as number with a leading zero (01-31). |
ddd | The abbreviated localized day name (e.g. 'Mon'..'Sun'). |
dddd | The long localized day name (e.g. 'Monday'..'Sunday'). |
M | The month as number without a leading zero (1-12). |
MM | The month as number with a leading zero (01-12). |
MMM | The abbreviated localized month name (e.g. 'Jan'..'Dec'). |
yy | The year as two digit number (00-99). |
yyyy | The year as four digit number (1752-8000). |
h | The hour without a leading zero (0..23 or 1..12 if AM/PM display). |
hh | The hour with a leading zero (00..23 or 01..12 if AM/PM display). |
m | The minute without a leading zero (0..59). |
mm | The minute with a leading zero (00..59). |
s | The second without a leading zero (0..59). |
ss | The second with a leading zero (00..59). |
z | The milliseconds without leading zeroes (0..999). |
zzz | The milliseconds with leading zeroes (000..999). |
AP | Use AM/PM display. AP will be replaced by either "AM" or "PM". |
ap | Use am/pm display. ap will be replaced by either "am" or "pm". |
char [identifier]
This command allows you to insert literal characters by their
numerical identifier, in decimal, octal or hexadecimal form.
To use it launch the Editing Command dialog and type char:
[number]
in the entry box, then hit
.
This command does a sed-like search/replace operation on the current line, or on the whole file (%s///).
In short, the text is searched for text matching the
search pattern, the regular expression between
the first and the second slash, and when a match is found, the
matching part of the text is replaced with the expression between the
middle and last part of the string. Parentheses in the search pattern
create back references, that is the command
remembers which part of the match matched in the parentheses; these
strings can be reused in the replace pattern, referred to as
\1
for the first set of parentheses,
\2
for the second and so on.
To search for a literal (
or
)
, you need to escape it using
a backslash character: \(\)
If you put an i
at the end of the
expression, the matching will be case insensitive. If you put a
g
at the end, all occurrences of the pattern will be
replaced, otherwise only the first occurrence is replaced.
Example 6.2. Replacing text in the current line
Your friendly compiler just stopped, telling you that the class
myClass
mentioned in line 3902 in your source file
is not defined.
"Buckle!" you think, it is of course
MyClass
. You go to line 3902, and instead of trying
to find the word in the text, you launch the Editing Command Dialog,
enter s/myclass/MyClass/i
, hit the
button, save the file and compile –
successfully without the error.
Example 6.3. Replacing text in the whole file
Imagine that you have a file, in which you mention a “Miss Jensen” several times, when someone comes in and tells you that she just got married to “Mr Jones”. You want, of course, to replace each and every occurrence of “Miss Jensen” with “Ms Jones”.
Enter the command line and issue the command
%s/Miss Jensen/Ms Jones/
and hit return, you
are done.
Example 6.4. A More Advanced Example
This example makes use of back references as well as a character class (if you do not know what that is, please refer to the related documentation mentioned below).
Suppose you have the following line:
void MyClass::DoStringOps( String &foo, String &bar String *p, int &a, int &b )
Now you realize that this is not nice code, and decide that you
want to use the const
keyword for all
“address of” arguments, those characterized by the &
operator in front of the argument name. You would also like to
simplify the white space, so that there is only 1 whitespace character
between each word.
Launch the Editing Command Dialog, and enter:
s/\s+(\w+)\s+(&)/ const \1 \2/g
and hit the
button. The g
at the end of the expression makes
the regular expression recompile for each match to save the backreferences.
Output:
void MyClass::DoStringOps( const String &foo, const String &bar String *p, const int &a, const int &b )
Mission completed! Now, what happened? Well, we looked for some
white space (\s+
) followed by one or more
alphabetic characters (\w+
) followed by some more
whitespace (\s+
) followed by an ampersand, and in
the process saved the alphabetic chunk and the ampersand for reuse in
the replace operation. Then we replaced the matching part of our line
with one whitespace followed by “const” followed by one
whitespace followed by our saved alphabetical chunk
(\1
) followed by one whitespace followed by our
saved ampersand (\2
)
Now in some cases the alphabetical chunk was
“String”, in some “int”, so using the
character class \w
and the +
quantifier proved a valuable asset.
goto [INT line]
This command navigates to the specified line.
find [pattern]
This command navigates to the first occurrence of
pattern
according to the configuration. Following
occurrences can be found using
->
(the default shortcut is F3).
The find command can be configured by appending a colon followed by one or
more options, the form is
find:options pattern
. The
following options are supported:
b
Search backwards.
c
Search from cursor position.
e
Search in the selection only.
r
Do regular expression search. If set, you may use
\N
where N is a number to represent captures in the
replacement string.
s
Do case sensitive search.
w
Match whole words only.
ifind [pattern]
This command provides “as-you-type” searching. You
can configure the behavior of the search by appending a colon
followed by one or more options, like this:
ifind:options pattern
. Allowed options are
b
Search backwards.
r
Do regular expression search.
s
Do case sensitive search.
c
Search from cursor position.
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