What I would really love to see - or, if it already exists and I didn’t know about it - is a Kate plugin that will let me highlight multiple sequences of characters.
Kate has this great behavior that when you select a section of text, it will highlight with a yellow background any occurrence of that sequence in other places in the editor - the same as you get when using the “find” function, but without needing to actually press CTRL+F.
I love this behavior, but I would like to be able to highlight multiple sequences and have them persist until I remove them, with different colors - this will really help me when I’m analyzing very large log files.
I found a simple “extension” to the “highlight selected text” behavior - if I select something then do “replace” (CTRL+R) but without doing anything with the replace panel, then the selected “text to replace” is persistently highlighted and I can now select another sequence to be “ad-hoc highlighted”, so I can have two different sequences highlighted - but unfortunately using the same color.