How to turn off document content in tab names for untitled Kate documents?

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1

I’ve noticed new behavior in Kate, where it takes a substring of the text contents in the document and adds it as part of the tab name. For example, if the document contains the text “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”, then the tab text becomes “Untitled (The quick brown fox jumps over t)”. I don’t like how much space it takes in the tab, and I find it distracting to have text appear in two places when using Kate as a scratchpad.

Looked through the Kate settings, but couldn’t find the relevant toggle to turn this off. Is this configurable?

Kate version: 25.12.3

2

By default, I always have the name of the file in the tab (and in the title window). For example:

imagen
imagen1589×1423 488 KB

As you see, is a very very large file (5.000+ lines of text).

My Kate is 25.12.3 too.

Operating System: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20260411
KDE Plasma Version: 6.6.4
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.25.0
Qt Version: 6.11.0
Kernel Version: 6.19.11-1-default (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 14 × Intel® Core™ Ultra 5 245K
Memory: 32 GiB of RAM (30.9 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070

Try to make a new user and log in with it, to see if he have the same issue.

Regards

3

The file name is in the tab name if the file exists. My query relates to tabs where there is no backing file. For me this is a common scenario as I use it as a scratchpad to copy and paste content.

4

I see now.

imagen
imagen1589×1423 193 KB

Before my previous post, I red all options and I didn’t find any option related. :roll_eyes:

Regards

5

I don’t seem to have this “feature” enabled, I couldn’t really tell you why, though:

image
image1111×289 28.1 KB

Also on 25.12.3

Could this be some plugin?

Edit: can’t reproduce in a current KDE Neon Live CD VM, either

6

Not sure why it’s not showing up for you. I turned off all plugins in Kate, and the behavior persists. I see the same behavior as in @Krovikan ‘s screenshot.

kate-hello-world
kate-hello-world1140×261 18.7 KB

I’m on Arch Linux if that matters.

7

No.

Its a newly added feature.

8

Well, I guess I’m not on the newest 25.12.3 then… I already know I’m not going to like this feature when it drops for me, though. I already much rather wish KDE applications with tabs offered a general setting to set a maximum tab width, since I always find it confusing when tabs take up half the screen.

9

Any plans on adding an option to give users the choice to turn this feature off? For me this feature makes the experience of using Kate worse.

10

I don’t have any plans. Don’t know about others.

11

Was it added based on user feedback about the previous behaviour?

12

That’s unfortunate. I guess the best solution will be to pin the package to the version before this change was introduced.

If you’re an Arch Linux user and you want the old behavior, you can get it by downgrading the ktexteditor package to ktexteditor-6.24.0-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst and pinning the version in pacman.conf.

13

There was a feature request and someone created a patch and we accepted it. There’s not a lot of feedback we get generally.

14

The best is to open a bug and suggest a better solution OR at least the problem that you are facing.

Pinning the package version is no solution. We will eventually upgrade to something where you will be forced to unpin.

15

OK. I would have argued for rejecting the feature request without a user preference toggle.

Some people clearly like this functionality (or it wouldn’t have been submitted) and for them it makes Kate better; some people don’t like it (per feedback in this thread) and for them it makes Kate worse. Which group is bigger? It’s not clear that any of us knows.

If you don’t have user feedback, then you can’t be sure that implementing this feature without a toggle delivers net benefit for the users.

16

Yeah, that is true. But unfortunately we don’t have any way to collect user feedback reliably.

17

Indeed - which should push us in the direction of making preference toggles the norm :slightly_smiling_face:

I feel like giving the user the power to choose is a key part of what makes KDE KDE.

18

That is not the answer always. And if we started doing that by default, it would become really difficult to use and develop Kate because of the complexity each new option brings that we have to maintain and the user has to deal with.

19

So if a merge request was made to add a preference toggle for this new “document summary in Untitled tab names” feature, would it be rejected on the grounds of added complexity?

20

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It depends on the option in question and how the discussion on the MR goes.