I love Kate. I LOVE Kate. It or its precursors have been my goto text editors since the beginning.
But lately it has two big strikes against it. One is that the typst syntax highlighting is not good, it renders everything between two $’s as red, which apart from being unpleasant visually is also unhelpful since most typst syntax highlighting in other editors (and the official app) use different highlighting within math mode for different strings, as you would expect. The typst highlighting is kind of useless as it stands.
The other big strike is that, unlike Konsole where we can disable font anti-aliasing, we’re stuck with the soft antialiasing that only looks good on modern fonts designed to be antialiased.
For me and many others who prefer the classic tack-sharp bitmap fonts of yesteryear for readability (and yes, aesthetics) Kate is not cutting the mustard. While Kate can handle “vector” font files that have embedded bitmaps, even when rendering such fonts at a “native” resolution (these files usually have at least one “native” bitmap size and the rest are scaled but some like Terminus have multiple size bitmaps embedded) it looks soft.
Both of these deficiencies are making me turn towards Sublime Text, a text editor that uses the “tinymist” Typst syntax highlighting and also three antialiasing options: off, gray, and subpixel.
Kate ought to consider these antialiasing options. My only recourse rn is to turn off font antialiasing all over KDE but that’s not what I want.