I am fairly new to programming and for my cs class i need to run individual programs. they don’t need to interact with anything else, so i am trying to just run the file I’m currently on but Kate just greys out the option. I really want to avoid using projects if i can because they’re just extra effort for no reason when I only need to run a single file. I did try using one, but Kate doesn’t have a new project button for some reason and i had some trouble with Cmake.

I’m aware that these are actually pretty basic things, but I can’t find anything online that actually explains how to use Kate at all. I would try using something else, but every IDE seems to have this same issue where by default it can’t run code and it has no documentation of any kind regarding actually running code, so i’ll just stick with the one that came with my distro.

also as a bonus question, why does every IDE seem to require you to configure every single option before it can run code and why do they all seem to discourage doing anything less than making an entire app?

    • tyler@programming.dev
      4·
      10 days ago

      I would say that for something to be an IDE it has to be meant to be an IDE. Clearly Microsoft didn’t intend for it to be an IDE or they would have called it that. Just because you can build something that looks and performs like an F1 race car in your garage out of an old lawnmower or ford Taurus or whatever doesn’t make it an F1 car. Unless it’s racing at Monaco in an F1 race, it ain’t an F1 car. Same thing with VS Code. It’s a code editor, like Sublime or vim.

    • RustySharp@programming.dev
      41·
      11 days ago

      Honestly interested what makes something not an IDE but can be one? The fact that it requires plugins to turn it into an IDE?

      Does that mean Eclipse is not an IDE either, since it requires either JDT or CDT to be anywhere near useful?

        • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
          22·
          10 days ago

          There isn’t a hard line. IDE means Integrated Development Environment. It just means that tools that - in the stone ages - were used separately are integrated into your editor. Common tools that IDEs integrate that would be separate tools with a text editor like Notepad:

          • Debuggers
          • Code intelligence (auto-complete, refactoring, go-to-definition, find-references, etc.)
          • Compile/run/debug shortcuts
          • Test running and displaying results
          • Version control

          VSCode has all of those. The fact that it implements them in a pluggable way doesn’t mean it doesn’t.

          Even though “is it an IDE” is a blurry line, VSCode is very clearly far across that line.

          The only reasons people say it isn’t are a) as a put-down - it’s not a real IDE like <my favourite alternative> - or b) because Microsoft put some nonsense about it not being an IDE on their website in order to try and explain why they make two IDEs (VSCode and VS).

      • towerful@programming.dev
        1·
        10 days ago

        To me, something like visual studio is an ide.
        Out of the box it can run and debug c# programs. I can step through line by line, I can add breakpoints, I can watch variables.
        It is a great experience for developing c#.

        To get vscode to do that requires a lot of configuration.
        Sometimes all that config is done by only 1 plugin.
        The fact that there are really well made plugins for so many different languages and frameworks is vscodes power. I don’t just get a js/ts/node/deno ide, but it can be super tailored to Vue/react/svelte/quasar/nuxt/next/whatever.
        All while in a familiar editor, and without having to install another program.

        That’s what I mean by vscode not being an IDE.
        Vscode has the ability to be an IDE, but it’s 3rd parties that actually do the work to achieve this.