60 lines
2.7 KiB
Markdown
60 lines
2.7 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Using Hugo with Kate"
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date: 2024-12-31
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draft: false
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tags:
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- KDE
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- Hugo
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summary: "My workflow for working on Hugo websites in Kate - KDE's Text Editor."
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---
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I use Hugo to build my website (which you can explore the source code to
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on [GitHub](https://github.com/redstrate/redstrate.com).) And because I love using
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KDE applications whenever I can, I do all of my editing - from config files, CSS
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and Markdown for posts - in [Kate](https://kate-editor.org).
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My song & dance when I want to edit my website is a bit inefficient. I
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would use Kate, then manually navigate to my folder. Or I would invoke Kate from
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the command-line to do the same. Then I would open a _separate Konsole window_
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(and sometimes the integrated terminal) in order to launch Hugo to build the
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site. I would then open up a separate terminal to perform git operations.
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So I have created a neat workflow that I think is worth sharing, in case you
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didn't know Kate had these features. This also serves as documentation to myself
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whenever I want to re-create it.
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# Sessions
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The first and easiest improvement is to use
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sessions. You can manage these under the "Session" menu item at the top of Kate.
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Instead of opening a fresh Kate session each time, the folder I was in (which is
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always my site's folder) and the open documents I have are saved automatically.
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Note that you probably need the Projects plugin enabled to have access to the
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"Projects" tab where it's state is also saved in the session.
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# External Tools
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The next thing to tackle is making it easier to launch Hugo. We can accomplish
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this by using External Tools, which is managed under Settings or under the Tools
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menu item. I have two, one for launching Hugo and the other for stopping it.
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These external tools are self-explanatory, but I set the working directory to `%{Project:Path}`
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to ensure it's running at the site root. I also have it set to spit out the Hugo
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output into the pane, but it doesn't actually display until the process quits
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which seems like a bug in Kate.
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It's not a huge deal, as the output is displayed when I use the "Stop Hugo" action. I suggest using the "-O" argument of `hugo server` to automatically open your default web browser when Hugo completes initialization.
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# Ideas
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It would be cool to have a preview pane that automatically finds the Markdown file
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you're editing and navigate to it, which seems possible. Another nicety would be
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a native Kate plugin to handle launching/stopping/configuring the Hugo server. But
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this workflow is already a big improvement over what I had before.
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