Kate is a powerful, cross-platform text editor much like Notepad++. It is native to the KDE Linux desktop environment and has been ported to Windows and Mac OS. I love using the same apps across platforms and having this added to the PortableApps suite would be fantastic.
You are here
Please Help Support Us
Please help support us by making a donation so we can keep bringing you awesome free software. We accept credit card, wire transfer, PayPal, cryptocurrency, and more.
If you recently donated, thank you!
Visit the Community page
Join our forums
Subscribe to our email newsletter
Subscribe with RSS
Follow us on BlueSky
Follow us on Facebook
Follow us on LinkedIn
Follow us on Mastodon
Kate is currently only available as a "preview version" for Windows. Once it is out of that status, we may consider portablizing it.
Alternatively, one of our developers may pick it up earlier than that to get it started.
I second the vote for Kate
After 7 years of development, and as a default editor in many KDE distrobuitons,
I think it matures enough to reconsider a portable version.
I really don't like the Microsoft Store or Chocolatey installation as provided in the offical website.
I concur, Kate is fast approaching peer status with Notepad++ in everything but its plugin ecosystem, and surely that would also be bolstered by the ability for users to have a portable version they can cart around with them and rely on.
Moreover, I've observed the Kate development team being uncommonly sensitive to maintaining feature parity across their supported platforms, to the point that they pulled the Flatpak distribution of Kate because the sandboxing broke several features that they'd been intently working to ensure consistent behavior for between bare-metal Linux and Windows environments. It spoke volumes to me that they would halt a Linux packaging effort for the sake of it reflecting poorly on the Windows port, which surely must have a miniscule userbase in comparison, still.
It'd be great if we could reward that attitude with an additional installation method that could legitimately boost their reach and visibility without any additional workload. In short, huzzah for Kate! It's been my go-to text editor on Linux for over a decade, and may soon be for me on Windows as well.
Stable builds are only available from the Microsoft Store from the publisher's download page. I did find what appears to be stable builds in regular format we could base off of here: https://cdn.kde.org/ci-builds/utilities/kate/
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
In Microsoft Store there is the build 23.04.0 (three years ago): now current stable build is 26.04.1 (the version numbers after the first are omitted).
Please see the page 'Index of /ci-builds/utilities/kate/release-26.04/windows' at https://cdn.kde.org/ci-builds/utilities/kate/release-26.04/windows/
Current stable release is the file 'kate-release_26.04-11618-windows-cl-msvc2022-x86_64.exe' https://cdn.kde.org/ci-builds/utilities/kate/release-26.04/windows/kate-....
See also on this page of Kate project on KDE.org at https://apps.kde.org/it/kate/ , down on item Releases:
--> latest official release is: 26.04.1 of 2026-05-07.