Kate: Not allowing to Edit Specific Files – Solution

Recently I encountered an interesting problem with Kate. When ever I opened certain files it opened them in read only mode. The files had the necessary permissions to let me write and I could open them in nano or vim and edit them successfully.

There can be multiple reasons for this happening:

• File is in use in some program (known to cause problems with Kate)
• File is a PHP file and being accessed somewhere
• File has more than 1024 characters in a line. (The limit might vary but after a point the files are opened as read only)

I fixed the problem in the following way:

1. Copy the file to another directory.
2. Open the file to edit on Kate.
3. Once opened make any minor change and save the file.
4. Now overwrite the old file(read only file) with the new one you just edited
5. Open the file in Kate and you should be able to edit it.

If the above steps dont fix the problem, look at the file permissions again. If thats fine, check if the file is being edited somewhere else.