Elixir editing on KDE’s Kate editor

2 min readMay 3, 2020

Wandering through de depths of the internet, I saw a blog post that really picked my interest. KDE’s Kate status of its LSP Client plugin.

I am a big KDE fan. I really like the aesthetics of this DE and with Manjaro Linux I’ve settled for good with this setup. Up to date kernels, MESA, KDE and some other things things I love.

Being a true KDE fan, I always enjoy reading and following the project’s status reports. Nate Graham blog updates are always a joy to read. I’ve noticed they spent quite a lot of time on fixing, tweaking and extending a component called KTextEditor which is the basis of Kate, KDevelop and other tools around KDE land. So, when I’ve found out that Kate gained an LSP Client plugin I thought that it could run Elixir quite well.

This is the end result:

So, here it is how you setup Kate to edit Elixir code:

Open up settings -> Configure Kate
Plugins -> enable LSP Client plugin, apply and restart Kate
Open up settings once again -> Configure Kate -> LSP Client
Under the tab User Server Settings add this snippet (you need to have cloned elixir-ls somewhere and ran its build first):

{
    "servers": {
        "elixir-ls": {
            "command": ["FULL PATH TO YOUR language_server.sh FILE"],
            "rootIndicationFileNames": ["mix.exs"],            
            "url": "https://github.com/elixir-lsp/elixir-ls",
            "highlightingModeRegex": "^(Elixir)$"
        }
    }
}

Restart Kate
Open any Elixir project (should start the LSP automatically)
Make sure you configure your project going to: Tools -> Mode -> Sources -> Elixir

That’s it!

Kate is a very simple editor but really performant when compared with most others. Here is what I’ve tested with this setup:

Auto-complete
Code formatting (although couldn’t find a way to trigger format on save)
Go to definition

Everything is working flawlessly and REALLY fast. This was quite a nice experience so far! Well done once again KDE developers :)

If you want to know more about Kate here are some links:

Kate’s website: https://kate-editor.org
Kate’s Elixir syntax highlighting source: https://kate-editor.org/syntax/data/syntax/elixir.xml (really concise if you compare it with other editors)
Kate’s GIT repo: https://invent.kde.org/kde/kate

I’ve added a post on ElixirForum too to discuss about this further if anyone is interested.

LSP is surely changing the landscape of code editors. Kate which I thought of as a competitor to Notepad is actually a beast with the LSP plugin. And this is coming from a real die hard fan of Emacs…

Elixir editing on KDE’s Kate editor

Written by Victor Nascimento