Make Kubuntu 9.04 use a single Kate session

I don't know if this was a KDE4 team or Ubuntu change, but somewhere along the way Kate stopped using a single session and started to open an instances of itself for each file. I suspect this is an Ubuntu change.

Anyway, if you want to have only a single instance of Kate running, here is how to fix this. You can edit the Kate menu entry by right-clicking on the K-menu and editing it. Edit the "Command: " line and insert '--use' between 'kate' and the '%U'. It should end up looking like this:

Command: kate --use %U

The other option is to manually open the file in a text editor: /home/user_name/.local/share/applications/kde4-kate.desktop (Where 'user_name' is the target user name).

You want to change the "Exec: " line. Insert '--use' between 'kate' and the '%U'. It should end up looking like this:

Exec: kate --use %U

Test the new configuration in Konqueror. If Konqueror gives you problems about not being able to open /usr/bin/kate, this is to a known bug in the KDE-Libs with DBUS. There is a workaround for this.

Open the file in a text editor (again): /home/user_name/.local/share/applications/kde4-kate.desktop (Where 'user_name' is the target user name).

Find the line "X-DBUS-StartupType=Multi" and change the "Multi" to "None".

That should fix your problem.