I am fairly new to programming and for my cs class i need to run individual programs. they don’t need to interact with anything else, so i am trying to just run the file I’m currently on but Kate just greys out the option. I really want to avoid using projects if i can because they’re just extra effort for no reason when I only need to run a single file. I did try using one, but Kate doesn’t have a new project button for some reason and i had some trouble with Cmake.
I’m aware that these are actually pretty basic things, but I can’t find anything online that actually explains how to use Kate at all. I would try using something else, but every IDE seems to have this same issue where by default it can’t run code and it has no documentation of any kind regarding actually running code, so i’ll just stick with the one that came with my distro.
also as a bonus question, why does every IDE seem to require you to configure every single option before it can run code and why do they all seem to discourage doing anything less than making an entire app?
There isn’t a hard line. IDE means Integrated Development Environment. It just means that tools that - in the stone ages - were used separately are integrated into your editor. Common tools that IDEs integrate that would be separate tools with a text editor like Notepad:
- Debuggers
- Code intelligence (auto-complete, refactoring, go-to-definition, find-references, etc.)
- Compile/run/debug shortcuts
- Test running and displaying results
- Version control
VSCode has all of those. The fact that it implements them in a pluggable way doesn’t mean it doesn’t.
Even though “is it an IDE” is a blurry line, VSCode is very clearly far across that line.
The only reasons people say it isn’t are a) as a put-down - it’s not a real IDE like <my favourite alternative> - or b) because Microsoft put some nonsense about it not being an IDE on their website in order to try and explain why they make two IDEs (VSCode and VS).
So Kate is one too then, right? it has all of that and was designed for it to be used as an IDE.
