Kate’s maintainer, Christoph Cullmann, shared a funny story over a beer one of the first days here at GCDS.

In ye olden days, what is now Kate and Kwrite was one application called “KWrite – KDE’s Advanced Text Editor”. However, the author of Kwrite mysteriously disappeared. Christoph forked Kwrite and continued working on it and after some time it greatly surpassed Kwrite’s capabilities and was becoming more of a power tool. A name change was long overdue. Being a good German, Christoph decided to name it after the philosopher Immanuel Kant, so in KDE 2.1 the editor “Kant” was born. For some strange reason, probably easier to understand for native English speakers, it was renamed to “Kate” in KDE 2.2. And thus was what still is KDE’s Advanced Text Editor was born.