Except that I've never heard of Kate. Nor do I know anyone that uses Kate. My expectation was purely based on the myriads of serious coders I've met over the years. They use different languages, they work on different projects/jobs. But most of them use either emacs, or vi (or a look-a-like). Rarely something else.

Abigail

Funny.
I havn't read enough of your posts to tell if you are kidding or not but for those that have never fired up KDE and poked around Kate is a text editor for KDE.

I'm sure Abigail-II isn't kidding. I'm a serious programmer and I've never heard of this Kate thing. But I also never use KDE or Gnome or any of those other fancy *nix gui things. My development is split between a Windows 2000 machine with putty (and then I use emacs) or Domino Designer which is from an entirely different world. So all of my text-based programming is done entirely to a console using emacs. It works great and I never have to deal with ugly library messes either.

Added: I also find it useful to have a local win32 copy of emacs and use that as well. That it happens to be in a gui doesn't mean that I treat it differently than my normal console-only emacs session.