One of the most missed features of Kate’s Vi input mode is Vim’s visual block mode. Visual block mode is entered by pressing ctrl+v and allows a rectangular block of text to be selected and manipulated. Also, text can be prepended or appended to the block, which is useful for, e.g. commenting out a range of lines.

Well, good news, everyone! There is now experimental support for visual block mode in Kate’s Vi input mode. Most text manipulation commands should already support visual block mode, and prepending/appending text (shift+i and shift+a, respectively) works, and you can select to end-of-line with $, as in Vim. I also made it possible to re-select the last visual selection with gv, and the marks '< and '> are set to the start and end position of the last visual selection. (Further down the road it will hopefully be possible to use marks in ex commands, too.)

There are probably still some rough edges, but visual block mode should already be usable. If you want to help test it, build Kate from git and try it out.