If you are on KDE/Plasma there is not real way around it anyway. Kate is more or less two parts...the kate shell and the KTextEditor framework. And the KTextEditor framework is used in several programs..kdevelop, kwrite, kile..I think also kmail uses it for writing emails.

So I don't really use kate that much directly....for single config file edits I use kwrite and for development usually kdevelop. But improvements to kate usually make it to those programs through KTextEditor as well so I am always happy about new kate versions.

As standalone programming editor kate works well enough. It's old and mature. Lacks some features of sublime and has some others sublime lacks. If you are into vim the vi-mode of kate (actually KTextEditor, works in other programs too) might be interesting. I still prefer a full IDE like kdevelop, I can't do without their variable-highlighting anymore but kate is a very capable editor for programming nonetheless.