Kate: What's the purpose of having both project view and a file system view?

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I have been trying out Kate lately and I would like to even contribute to it. However, there’s one thing I am having trouble understanding.

The project plugin includes its own tree view for viewing files while there exists another plugin for viewing the file system. Both of these also have features exclusive to one another, in fact, I keep switching from type of viewer to another because some features are just missing from one another. These include limited file operations for the project tree view while the file system view doesn’t have things like Git integration or “Open Terminal Here.”

Keeping these separate makes no sense to me and I want to try and understand why its made like this in the first place before I make contributions related to it. Wouldn’t be better if these two were merged?

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They are two separate plugins solving two separate problems, and you can activate them independently based on your specific needs for that specific session. Filesystem view is just a simple file browser lets you browse the filesystem, open files and do basic file management.

The project view is part of the more complex “project” plugin. It is mainly focusing on showing the file structure of the projects, and exposing project-related functionalities. Also the file list might not provided by the filesystem.

You might also want to try out the integrated terminal which automatically opens at the path of the current document.

For complex multi-file editing you probably arrange your files in projects anyway, so I think you spend more time in projects view.