Raw Paste for Kate?

General
1

Hello KDE team,

I’ve been on Linux for about a year now and have no desire to go back to Windows. The transition wasn’t hard — I got comfortable with the TTY, I emulate or replay older games, I never needed Office (always used free alternatives), and for tinkering I relied heavily on Notepad++.

Notepad++ became my go-to for small scripts, quick edits, or automation tinkering. When I moved to Linux, I wanted Kate to be my replacement — it integrates beautifully with KDE, feels powerful, and almost fits my workflow perfectly. Almost.

Here’s the problem: Kate does not support true raw text paste.

By “raw paste,” I mean the most basic editor behavior since the 1970s:

  • Highlight text, hit paste, and have that selection replaced exactly by what’s in the clipboard.

  • Preserve every space, tab, and newline as-is.

  • Touch nothing outside the highlighted block.

Kate fails this test. The first line pastes correctly, but every subsequent line gets shoved back to column 0. I went to war with the settings: disabled every “smart” option, stripped indentation features, turned off highlighting, word wrap, you name it. I gutted Kate through every visible toggle in the UI, and yet it still insists on re-positioning lines.

That’s when frustration set in. This is not an exotic ask. Paste raw text is a function older than I am. You don’t need a fancy algorithm — it’s basically cp. It’s like a hammer: simple, dumb, indestructible, and always does exactly what you expect. Yet in Kate (2025), this basic feature isn’t available to me without either:

  • recompiling and ripping out the indentation engine, or

  • writing a plugin just to remap “Paste Raw” as the default paste action.

I’m not a heavy keyboard shortcut guy; I navigate mostly with the mouse (old habits die hard). So a hidden “Paste Special → Paste Raw” menu item doesn’t solve the problem. I want Kate to have a toggle or mode where Paste always means raw paste.

Why it matters

When I’m working, I often have rewrites or fixes scribbled down in blocks. I copy them and expect to paste them directly over a selected chunk of text. In Notepad++ this was trivial; in Kate it’s impossible without playing “musical Tab key” or pasting one line at a time. It breaks the workflow.

I love KDE, I love Kate’s potential, but right now this one missing behavior makes me want to throw my hands up and use FeatherPad instead — because at least it pastes like a 1970s home computer.

So, please: can Kate get a proper “Paste Raw Text” mode, ideally exposed as a first-class option or toggle? I promise you, it’s not just me. This is the kind of simple feature that makes or breaks everyday usability.

Thank you for your time — and for listening to me shake my fist at the KDE sky gods.
also if I’m just dumb and this already exists let me know, I’m not afraid of being wrong

1 Like
2

I just tried this and it seems to work?

My “copied” text looks like this

test1
test2   test3
    test4
    test5
test6

My original “paste” target looks like this

foo bar baz

I highlighted “bar” and pasted, the text is now

foo test1
test2   test3
    test4
    test5
test6 baz

The first line of the “copied” text replaces the rest of the line in the target text.
The next line did not have indentation and thus does not have one in the result either.
The third and forth line were indented and are in result.
The last line was copied without the new line at the end and thus this line ends with the end of the original line.

2 Likes
3

It may not be a “paste raw text” issue, maybe instead an “auto-format on paste” issue.

Try to do a CTRL-Z after paste, to see if your columns re-align as intended.
It is still annoying though, but I’m confident this behavior can be turned off. :slight_smile:

4

In Tools (menu) >> Indentation, what option have you chosen?

I tried @krake’s example in my Kate.

With Tools >> Indentation set to “Normal”, I get the same behavior as @krake .

With Tools >> Indentation set to “Python”, I get the behavior that I think you are describing on your system.

1 Like