Hello,
I’m wondering how can I use meld for a file compare of two open document in Kate?
I’m running Kate v25.04.0 (flatpak) on Linux Mint v 21.3.
compare with active document and b) compare with active document Using .How can I fix the problem?
Thanks for any suggestion.
flatpak version has difficulty with file access, so my guess would be a permissions thing.
have you gone into flatseal and lit up all the toggles for kate?
if that doesn’t work, then you will have to install the native .deb version if you can.
The primary method for installing Kate in Linux Mint would be to use apt (or, for the enlightened, NALA).
sudo nala install kate
Then remove the flatpak.
Yes flatseal is granting Kate already access to the filesystem filesystem=host.
I think that can’t be teh reason.
Why are the actions greyed out (see my 1st post)?
And the version from the Mint repository is missing some (for me) important features and it’s therefore not an options.
the only other option is to try the appimage
you will need to make this executable to run it.
another thought occurs to me, you are not using a flatpak of meld, are you?
Nope, meld is installed from the Mint repo.
I will pause this topic for a few days.
Cheers
I don’t know that it will help much, but if I understand correctly looking at what I think is the relevant code for Kate, it looks like it tries to find the tools in the PATH and if it doesn’t find them, the actions get disabled:
QList<std::pair<QString, QString>> KateFileActions::supportedDiffTools()
{
// query once if the tools are there in the path and store that
// we will disable the actions for the tools not found
static QList<std::pair<QString, QString>> resultList{{QStringLiteral("kdiff3"), safeExecutableName(QStringLiteral("kdiff3"))},
{QStringLiteral("kompare"), safeExecutableName(QStringLiteral("kompare"))},
{QStringLiteral("meld"), safeExecutableName(QStringLiteral("meld"))}};
return resultList;
}
Having said that, I’ve tried the Kate flatpak from Flathub and it doesn’t seem to disable any of the entries normally for me, and simply throws the error “The selected program could not be started. Maybe it is not installed.”. I even tried creating a shell script, naming the file meld, that runs flatpak-spawn --host meld $@, making it executable and overriding the flatpak path to point to the folder the script was in, but it didn’t help.
The only time the options showed as disabled was when I was trying to compare a currently empty/unsaved file against an existing saved file.
oh, this is a good point… both files must be saved for any of the compare features to work because they are comparing FILES, not what is saved in a buffer somewhere.
I’d like to apologize in advance for my ignorance, as I am a very new Linux user (OpenSUSE Leap 16.0). That said, my understand of the “everything is a file” philosophy in Linux leads me to believe that even that buffer you describe as housing the unsaved contents of the document could be compared, but perhaps they just didn’t implement that.
I’m also totally ready to be wrong about that. Are buffers like those we’re discussing actually not files, and instead just volatile data in RAM memory registers, lacking any file structure?
i’m sure there is a file (or part of one) somewhere in /proc or /run but finding it is another matter and expecting it to be stable across reboots might be even more of a stretch.
I would think that Kate would inherently already know where they are, though, since it put them there and has an active connection to them by virtue of displaying their contents in its editor frames.
I’m still poking around with editors and modules trying to find a low-fuss visual string compare with dark theme myself, and a lot of the discussions like these I have come across in my travels are fascinating. A big thanks to all of you who frequent these forums and help each other and everyone else that wanders along in the process!
This means that git was not found. Kate uses that to compare documents.
The other case was fixed (for flatpak) a few months ago so it should work better now.
Yes, (they might be getting persisted) but for this case, yes they are in memory only.
This feature can be trivially implemented for unsaved files (by writing the files to a temporary location and then comparing them). It just hasn’t been done yet.
I had a similar issue and thought it would be helpful to note for others who come across this thread:
The option will also be greyed out if you are trying to compare files in split views.
Same question, but answers are depreciated since Kate doesn’t ned to run as flatpack anymore.
You can hit F4 to get the embedded terminal… typing ‘meld file1 file2’ generally works.
There you go 
assuming you got to this thread searching how to use file compare in kate:
with two tabs open in kate you just right click on the non-active tab and chose compare from the context menu.
the OP’s question was a bit different as they were trying to do a compare with a file that had not yet been saved, so meld had nothing to work it (it requires two files to compare).
