This is a series of posts that will give a quick overview of a variety of GUI text editors for Linux. Terminal text editors (Vi, nano, etc.) will not be covered here, as well as Emacs, as most developers know about Emacs. The first part of the series will cover KDevelop, my personal favorite text editor for programming. We will be looking at KDevelop version 3.5.1, and not KDE 4 KDevelop.

Other editors covered in this series:

• Geany
• Mousepad
• Gedit
• More to come

If there is one thing that it isn’t, KDevelop is not lightweight, as it’s main focus is features and flexibility.

When it has finished loading, you are are greeted with the following screen. Click on it to see the full size version.

You will notice that you have the ability to store code snippets in KDevelop, as I have demonstrated in the above screenshot with storing the tag that tells a browser to load an external CSS file

To create a new file, you first have to tell KDevelop where to put the file and what the filename is. This is done so the syntax highlighter knows what type of file it is.

KDevelop is a text editor that uses tabs, has a built in terminal, and you can read documentation from within it.

KDevelop is very customizable. There are many options you can set. Like other KDE programs, keyboard shortcuts are also editable. KDevelop can also access files on a remote server, thanks to KIO.

KDevelop supports syntax highlighting for many, many languages. Syntax highlighting is also customizable, should you not like the colors.

That concludes this informal overview of KDevelop. Give it a whirl and see if it fits your development needs.