# Configuring &kate;

## Overview

&kate; offers several means of tweaking the application to behave as desired. The most important ones are:

The Configuration Dialog

- The main configuration tool, allowing you to configure the &kate; application, the editor component and the usage of plugins.

The Settings Menu

- Allows you to change often used settings, and to launch the configuration dialogs.

The View Menu

- Allows you to split the current frame, as well as to display the icons and line numbers pane for the currently edited document.

The embedded terminal uses the configuration defined in the &systemsettings;, and may also be configured by clicking the &RMB; to display a context menu.

## The Main Configuration Dialog

The &kate; configuration dialog displays a tree of topics on the left, and a configuration page corresponding to the selected topic on the right.

The configuration is divided into two groups, namely

- Application configuration

- Editor component configuration

## The &kate; Application Configuration

This group contains pages to configure the main &kate; application

### General

This section contains a few global options for &kate;

Behavior

- Warn about files modified by foreign processes

- When enabled, &kate; will notify you about files modified from outside the application whenever the main window receives input focus. You will be able to deal with several modified files at once, you can reload, save or discard changed files in groups.

  If not enabled, &kate; will prompt you for action when an externally modified file receives focus within the application.

Close Kate entirely when the last file is closed

- If enabled, &kate; will shutdown when the last file being edited is closed, otherwise a blank page will open so that you can start a new file.

Meta Information

- Keep meta-information past sessions

- When enabled, &kate; will store meta data such as bookmarks and session configuration even when you close your documents. The data will be used if the document is unchanged when reopened.

Delete unused meta information after

- Set the maximum number of days to keep meta information for previously opened files. This helps keeping the database of meta information reasonably sized.

### Sessions

This section contains options related to using sessions.

Session Elements

- Include window configuration

- If enabled, &kate; will save the window configuration with each session.

Behavior on Application Startup

- Select how you want &kate; to behave at startup. This setting can be overridden by specifying what to do on the command line.

  Start new session

- With this option, &kate; will start a new, unnamed session when you start the application.

Load last-used session

- &kate; will use the most recently opened session at startup. This is good if you want to use the same session always or switch rarely.

Manually choose a session

- &kate; will display a small dialog that lets you choose your preferred session, or load the default session if none have been saved. This is the default behavior. Nice if you use a lot of different sessions frequently.

Any changes to the session data (opened files and, if enabled, window configuration) will always be saved.

### Plugins

This page provides a list of installed plugins for the &kate; application. Each plugin is represented with its name and a short description. You can check the checkbox with an item to enable the plugin it represents.

If a plugin provides configuration options, a section to access those will appear as a child of this page.

For more information about the available plugins, see plugins.

### The Editor Component Configuration

For information about this section of the configuration dialog, see the Editor Component Configuration section of the &katepart; Handbook.

### Configuring With Document Variables

For information about using document variables with &kate;, see the Configuring with Document Variables section of the &katepart; Handbook.