Version:            (using Devel)
Compiler:          gcc-4.4.3 
OS:                Linux
Installed from:    Compiled sources

An option to hide the horizontal and/or vertical scroll bars in the interest of screen real-estate  efficiency would be useful. This is especially true in the case of vi mode, as the interface becomes largely keyboard driven, and also when the statusbar is enabled showing the current cursor position, which makes using the scrollbars for that information redundant.

Having such an option in Kate's profiles would also be consistent with the design of Konsole, which allows toggling scrollbar visibility I would assume for similar reasons (one might use screen or tmux which have keyboard driven scrollback buffers).

According to the docs: http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/kdesdk/kate/kate-part.html#kate-part-overview

"The scroll bars are displayed and hidden as required."

As far as I can tell this isn't strictly the case unless this note is only referring to Kate's current behavior of always showing scrollbars except when dynamic word-wrap is enabled. Bugs 191287 and 173255 mention these inconsistencies, so I am filing this as a wishlist item instead.

Users/developers looking to optimize screen use with efficient interfaces such as tiling WMs, or who use devices with small displays would appreciate options like this particularly in KDE applications geared towards productivity such as Kate.