SUMMARY When viewing large files in Kate, I want to filter the lines to reduce visible lines. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Examine large but noisy logs, e.g. /var/log/messages 2. On the command line, grep allows logs to be filtered. 3. I want a way to filter matching or non-matching lines in Kate. OBSERVED RESULT Kate includes a "Find" facility (CTRL+F). However it lacks the ability to hide non-matching text. EXPECTED RESULT Extend the "power search and replace bar" to include three choices: * No filtering (the current behaviour) * Show matching lines * Hide matching lines Since the "Find" expression already supports regular expression mode, the user has lots of flexibility in deciding what to show/hide. Hidden lines are still in the document, the hide/show steps don't modify the text of the document. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION The ability to filter large unstructured files provides benefit similar to code folding for source code, e.g. C++. Wireshark's "display filters" provide a similar concept, though in quite a different context.
Kate is not a log viewer, but a text editor. I suggest to use a specialized log viewer which has filtering features. Implementing this feature in a text editor requires major code changes, because people would expect that it also works while editing.
Thanks for responding. I had hoped that the existing code folding functionality, that allows blocks of source code to be collapsed/expanded would allow lines that match a filter to be hidden/shown without too much difficulty. However I'm not familiar with the Kate source code so can't judge how big an effort this would be. I'm setting this to "Resolved/Not a Bug" since you've indicated the code changes would be major. There's also merit in not trying to add every possible feature to Kate. Perhaps a dedicated log viewer (can you recommend one?) would be better, allowing Kate to keep its focus on editing.