When typing "exit" in an embedded Konsole pane, the console should close and Kate should not exit. In other words, this should have the same effect as closing the Konsole pane. Marking as "Severity: Major" as this is a dataloss issue. Kate does not ask for confirmation of saving edited files when exiting in this case.
That's strange: when I type `exit` or press ctrl+d, the pane closes, and Kate does not exit. Is this a distribution issue? What KDE version are you using?
Kubuntu 11.10, KDE 4.7.4 For me the issue is completely reproducible.
$ kde4-config -v Qt: 4.7.4 KDE Development Platform: 4.7.4 (4.7.4) kde4-config: 1.0
I failed to reproduce the reported problem. And the problem sounds mysterious/impossible to me :) Start Kate from terminal(konsole or any other emulator), see whether these is any interesting information printed when Kate "exits" due to the embedded konsolepart.
✈saturn:~$ kate Object::connect: No such slot KateExternalToolsPlugin::viewDestroyed(QObject*) kate(20363)/konsole Konsole::Session::run: Attempted to re-run an already running session. kate: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/kde4/libkonsolepart.so: undefined symbol: _ZN7Konsole14SessionManager9saveStateEv ✈saturn:~$
Did you compile konsole from source code by yourself? The message implies that libkonsolepart.so and libkonsoleprivate.so does not match. Please check how you compiled and installed konsole. In the code of Konsole, the name Konsole::SessionManager::saveState() is no longer there since KDE SC 4.8. But it should be still there in KDE SC 4.7.4.