I’m loving Kate so far, however I’m sad that I can’t change my caret to a block style. I understand this has to do with vi input modes, but I’m not a vim kinda guy.
Are there any plans to change this?
I see no signs of plans to change this.
You’re right that the block caret style in Kate is technically coupled with the Vi input mode.
The underlying KTextEditor component supports block, underline, and half-height caret styles, but these are not exposed as a user-configurable option outside of the Vi mode.
I’m not sure why.
Me Two
If you press INSERT key on the keyboard, the cursor will become block style.
That does work, however I wouldn’t quite call it a solution as I have to enable it each time I launch the editor. If this were to become a permanent option in the preferences it would be perfect.
Maybe because (as noted by @waqar ) the ‘Block’ caret style is used to denote “REPLACE” (“OVERWRITE”) mode, while the default style is for “INSERT” mode (the usual mode of modern text editors).
I like the current behaviour because the ‘Block’ style intuitively tells me that the character being highlighted by the caret will be replaced in that mode.