Hello World,
Why the heck can’t Kate do basic text editing stuff like bold, italic, underline, color selected text, etc.?? 
It’s been at least 30 minutes since I started really looking at this program, checking every nook and cranny and for the life of me I can’t figure out how to do any of that, am I missing something or is this program really this crappy(at least for regular users, maybe it’s good for ppl that write code, really don’t care about that)?!?!?! 
Thanks.
Kate is a text editor, that means it only deals with “raw” text files which don’t provide any features like styling text. It’s more targeted at people writing code or these raw text files.
What you want is something like LibreOffice.
That’s not what Kate was designed to do.
Bingo!
sudo pacman -S libreoffice-fresh
Start the LibreOffice Write application, and bask in it’s bolding, underlining, colouring and italic…ing… abilities! 
Looool, that’s funny, I figured a “text editor” is supposed to be able to edit text, hahahaha!
Anyway, maybe I am wrong and pissing you people off(if so sorry) and I already have LibreOffice installed, but please keep in mind I am coming from a 20+ years windows mentality where I would only manually open MS Office when I had some real text editing to do(like writing a formal letter or working on the old CV or some shit like that…), but the default program to handle .txt files was notepad or wordpad that could do some basic stuff like what I described.
So I guess I’m gonna start looking for a wordpad/notepad replacement, if anyone has any suggestions feel free to leave them, thank you.
What is it you would like to do with it?
Memos? Reminders? How to’s? Shopping list? There are great tools for all these things.
I like AlternativeTo for seeing if alternatives to a given app is available on Linux…
https://alternativeto.net/software/wordpad/?platform=linux
Yeap, that’s the site I was gonna use on my own, but I figured I’d drop that line because that site doesn’t know that I am running arch linux, or that I choose KDE Plasma, or a million other things that might matter that I probably(most likely) don’t even have any idea about.
So if you guys had any insight into which specific alternative would be best for me/us, I wanted to take advantage of that instead of literally trying every single alternative out there myself. Might be a bit lazy but there you have it.
If Notepad could achive it with a .txt file than Kate should be able to. If you have a specific example we can probably figure it out.
Wordpad is a lot lighter than LibreOffice, and there are lighter alternatives to LibreOffice, but I would suggest to learn the features you need from LibreOffice once and then be able to use it everywhere.
Try kile.
It’s a TeX/LaTeX Editor.
kate(and most other Linux text editors), is a plain text editor. Plain text doesn’t support things like bold and italic.
On Windows, many tools that call themselves text editors are actually rich text editors. So there is a nomenclature difference here.
I think tools that you could consider that might meet your needs are Libreoffice writer, OnlyOffice or FreeOffice TextMaker. The latter two are probably going to be more familiar to Windows users.
sudo pacman -S abiword
Basic rich text editor. Been a while since I used WordPad, but it looks pretty similar to me.
Cool, I’ll try Abiword first then, if not then kile as @Grothesk suggested above, and if still not then I’ll move to whatever alternativeto.net spits out. Thank you everyone.
And especailly thanks to @dalto for that little nomenclature explanation, it does clear up some stuff.
I’ll just mark @UncleSpellbinder 's post as solution, but like I said thank you to everyone.
In Windows there is (or was 20+ years ago) also a program called “editor”, with less functions than “kate”. It was good for working on .ini-files and other system-stuff. Of course no tabs, every file opens in a new window. Because many users wanted a more useful “editor”, notepad and wordpad came along to Windows.
Use OnlyOffice instead. You can use it as an Appimage to test it out before actually installing it. Or you can just continue using the Appimage.
Website: https://www.onlyoffice.com/en/download-desktop.aspx
Not many people actually use Abiword.
Either that or use LibreOffice. It’s full-featured, with some features not found in OnlyOffice. But, OnlyOffice is generally more familiar to MS Office users.
As others may have mentioned, most Linux users want a text editor that does not add unnecessary formatting codes into text configuration files, so any editor that allows one to use bold, italics, underlining, highlighting, etc, just add unnecessary embedded code into text files used for storing configuration data. I use a little program called dos2unix that strips away all superfluous formatting code from text files created on a Windows machine with tools like Notepad and even heavier editors. It’s easier just to use a tool that only edits text, not adds unnecessary code to text files.
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