[sneak]

vim and emacs are TUI; Kate is a GUI app.

VSCode is a full-fledged IDE; Kate is much simpler. Think of it as comparable to TextEdit or notepad.exe, but with more features.

It's definitely trending in the VSCode direction, but VSCode is full of surveillance and corporate API clients, and Kate is not.

[nequo]

Emacs is not TUI. Its main frontend is GUI, you can display images, play videos, read PDFs in it if you want to.

[karmajunkie]

Come again? Most people install the windowed version of it today, but its history is very definitely TUI-based. All of the features you mentioned are things that have been added along the way as its container was able to support them.

[nequo]

Historically being TUI-centric doesn’t mean that it is not GUI today, right?

It supports all your fonts, font ligatures, varying font sizes inside the same buffer, renders images inside your buffers, all without relying on a terminal emulator or Sixel support. Sounds fundamentally not TUI to me.