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?
Try asking her.
What language are you programming in?
As far as I’m aware, in many cases, Kate just gives you access to the terminal where you can type commands to compile / run your code.
So, I’m a bit rusty, but I believe in Kate you would hit F4 to get a terminal window and you would execute
gcc your_file.c -o your_output_file
Then after that’s run you’d type just “your_output_file” and hit enter
I think on windows you’d need to make sure the output file name ends with .exe but I’m not sure about that, maybe someone else can chime in?
that does work, it’s a little clunkier than i’d like but it’s better than the code not running
I struggled with stupid basic things like that (“how do I run a file??!”) when I was beginning to learn programming. What you can do is just open a terminal and run a command, that’s it, like python main.py. Sorry that it doesn’t answer the question.
When learning a programming language I think it’s better to find the commands you’d use to compile/run the program and run them in the terminal the first few times so you know what’s actually happening behind the run button. Then start running things through the IDE if it’s more convenient. If you tell us the language we can help with the commands (is it C?)
I hadn’t heard of Kate before, so I can’t offer much hands-on advice. I dug around and found a “handbook” here: https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/kate/kate/index.html
Unfortunately it does look like you need to define a project to compile/run anything, which appears to require manually creating a .kateproject file in the directory as outlined here:
https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/kate/kate/kate-application-plugin-projects.html#project-create
I had exactly the same problem when I moved from languages that were interpreted or combined the IDE and runtime environment into one, and starting to use languages which had their own external compiler. Unfortunately, open source project user documentation is often terrible for beginners (what I found above for Kate seems to be no exception), and IDEs often seem to be written by people who don’t really expect anyone to actually use the included build options (to be fair, most folks seem to like using their own separate build utilities, so probably this is often the case)
If you can tell us which compiler or interpreter you’re using (e.g. gcc, clang, Python), someone can probably tell you how to compile and/or run a single-file program from the terminal with a fairly simple command.
