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Sometimes you want to test something, then you might need to add an if or so. With braces, you just add it, and you can immediately execute it. With python, you have to get indentation right. And you never know where a block ends, unless you look at the indentation level.

And to GP: the next time you have to write something in python for whatever reason (unfortunately python is almost unavoidable), try kate block mode.

Notepad++ is pretty nice, but it does not hold a candle to several of the Linux based text editors.
For instance:
kate http://kate-editor.org/
gedit https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Ge...
vim http://www.vim.org/
emacs https://www.gnu.org/software/e...

Like I said, Notepad++ is a good editor, and I use it myself when forced to use Windows, but it does not compare to what is offered in Linux. Also, most things in Linux are well documented. Sadly there are some things that are not, but practically nothing I have ever needed documentation for in Windows has had decent documentation.

Kate actually has a very capable Vim emulation mode nowadays - check it out!. It doesn't have everything, but it has a small number of extra features which I find handy - the completion in the search/replace bar and the "auto-escape for regex search" features I use quite often. And since it's usable with KDevelop, I can enjoy the latter's really surprisingly good code-completion features.

Yeah we get it, you're 1337. See above response about Vim emulation in Katepart and shut up, thanks.

KDevelop uses Kate as its editing component, which has a Vim emulation mode. Using this Vim mode, you would just do

(N-1)j

e.g.

4j

to delete 5 lines downwards. Additionally, KDevelop has probably the best C++ navigation/ code completion I've ever seen in an open-source IDE - it's a huge productivity booster for me.

Moving away to design tablet-y interfaces while those apps are still an eyesore is beyond me.

Not the same people work on all apps and interfaces.
The mobile work is mostly done by people paid by Nokia, open-slx, and basysKom.

I don't care about Marble, and I don't think improvements to it should be "release notes".

Pre-release notes are not as detailed as the final notes.
KDE releases three software bundles every 6 months: Plasma Workspaces, Applications, and Frameworks.
In the final release, each bundle gets its own release announcement. Marble in one of the most active KDE Applications and when the devs work hard, they deserve to be mentioned in the (pre-)release notes, be it Marble, Kate, or even some game.

Kate also has significant improvements this update, but no one but Kate developers mention them at all.

Nobody is hindering any Kate dev to extend the release notes draft on KDE's Etherpad instance. It's open to edit for anyone. I look at the draft for the final release announcements at this moment. Heck, even the comments sidebar say that another application than Marble should get spotlight in the upcoming announcement. So far nobody stepped forward with an improved application that was not featured in the KDE Apps 4.6 announcement (even Kate was featured last time http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.6/applications.php )
Looking at http://kate-editor.org/ I see no posts mentioning new features for 4.7. There is a quite extensive one for 4.6 but not for 4.7. There are some articles about current GSoC progress but those won't show up before 4.8.

Who is writing the release notes?

The ones who volunteer to do it, like with any other community project.
Feel free to extend release notes drafts yourself.

So yeah, less effort on Nepomuk/Strigi

KDE is a community project mostly made up of volunteers. You cannot force a volunteer to work on something he doesn't want to. Though you can hire one of the firms that do business around KDE to improve the things you prefer.

that everyone but the main devs seem to hate, at least I haven't read or heard anything positive not coming from a KDE dev

I'm not a KDE developer and I like Nepomuk.
GNOME/Tracker developers also like Nepomuk which is the reason they've adopted it long ago.

more visible, non-refactoring work so people can stop saying KDE sucks every time.

Haters will hate and are the vocal group. I happen to like KDE.

I find Kate to be of equal usefulness.

It has a horizontal sidebar approach when opening new files, freeing me from the clutter of having multiple tabs or windows open.

Not everyone uses an IDE. There's a hell of a lot of us who still use emacs and vi.

I suppose if it's 'vi' and not 'vim', you might have a point. But emacs absolutely should be able to do something like that.

IDE's features tend to make it sputter on lower end computers and/or large projects, and there advantages are minimal to nill.

However, one thing they have over Notepad: Syntax highlighting.

I hear you -- I use Kate for development these days. But even there, I've at least got syntax highlighting and code folding.

I can grep and find all references to a variable faster than most IDEs will find them for me.

Then for you, hungarian notation should be equally redundant.

ahh, poor windows users :)
though you might be blessed with kate soon (http://kate-editor.org/).

Many a true word spoken in jest. My 'word processor' now consists of shell script which uses sed to convert my own very idiosyncratic markup into HTML, pipes that through tidy and then through an XSL transform which adds standard boilerplate headers as required and then through Prince to generate print-ready PDF.

Why?

• First, it means I can use any text editor I like to edit my text (currently I use kate);
• Second, it plays nice with CVS;
• Third, I can define my own markup at any time;
• Fourth, it saves distractions;
• Fifth, it separated content from presentation, so that I can produce an editor's galley proof or a print-ready paperback from the same text.

OK, I accept this wouldn't suit everyone but it works for me.

The memory footprint for apps such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint are much lower than comparable Linux apps like OpenOffice, AbiWord and KWrite.

It would be interesting to see your source about this. The claim on OpenOffice.org Writer may be credible, but KWord (I suppose you meant that by KWrite, since KWrite is a very basic text editor) is way faster and snappier than MS Word (fine, it has also less features and all, but it is faster to load), and I am not going to believe your claim without data to support it.

GEdit is much slower than notepad.exe,

Not sure about GEdit, but Notepad is almost featureless and has not changed in a decade or so. It has no code highlighting, no handling of different line endings, no support for different encodings, no tab handling, no plugin framework, no multi-file mode, and in fact its only feature is a search feature without regular expressions. Of course it's going to be fast. For that sake "Hello world" is even faster. I do most of my programming in Kate and I am very happy with that. Notepad may be faster, but it does not do what a text editor is supposed to do in order to be useful.

I've started using kate for a book I'm writing. And it really is better than a word processor. I have my list of independent documents -- roughly corresponding to chapters -- in the left-hand pane, and the chapter I'm working on in the right-hand pane. I can flick between chapters -- handy if I need to move a paragraph -- without the need for endless scrolling. The simple monospaced font is not distracting. I know I needn't worry about what the text will look like once it's printed out; I can concentrate on the words, and deal with the letters later.

I'm sure this behaviour was really meant for complex programming projects where you have several source files and it's necessary to be able to flick between them ..... but it's good for the other thing, too!

Never mind that I have never even seen a decent XML editor

As far as I've come into contact with developers there never has been the slightest doupt what the right thing is. Tabs where introduced as the solution to this very problem. The only problem is that ancient vi and emacs aparently can't deal with them properly. Or their users sometimes are to lazy to set them up properly. The big problem is when experienced professionals follow suit with some blockheads and a few years later themselves insist on everybody using spaces at any time.
Why should everybody degrade the sourcecode because some dick on the team insists on using a 25 year old editor? Why should we be forced to use spaces in interpreted webapp languages because some webserver is to crappy to deal with tabs in the right manner? Unless there's some exotic situation - which I can't think of right now - that requires spaces to be used the stored source should be tabs. Then everyone can decide by himself how wide his indents are without bugging anybody else with his habbits. And if you're to fucking lazy to set up your vi or emacs properly to deal with the problem (either by back and forth conversion of tabs2spaces/spaces2tabs or by altering the display of code) and thus insist on the team following your whim you're nothing but a fucking assh*le. Get with the 3 millenium allready and get yourself a proper editor. There are enough around allready.

This whole discussion reminds me of 5 Million mindless dumb and stubborn outlook idiots establishing fullquote bloat and degrading email to something worse than AOL chat for everybody else, just because their mailer is so crappy.

Bottom line: The solution linked is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist because in a professional enviroment everyone can decide for themselves how their code is displayed, how large tabs are and if they're automatically converted into spaces if I want to use edlin.

P.S.: In the recent years, so I've heard, we even got a new problem popping up: People mixing spaces and tabs in the same sourcefile. Now there's a bunch that deserves to be shot at sight.

My 2 cents.