kate (ubuntu 16.04) does not have tab plugin

Question

I previously used kate on Ubuntu 14.04 which worked quite well. After upgrading to Ubuntu 16.04, however, the tab plugin just disappeared. So if I have just a few source files opened it becomes hard to navigate between them.

How can the tab plugin for kate (v15.12.3) work again under Ubuntu 16.04?

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Edit: Basically what missing is the tab control. I don't know why it's left out in the latest kate version - previously there were two tab plugins (the standard one and the multi-tab plugin which allows to configure how many lines of tab bar). Now both these plugins are not present anymore so navigating among many opened documents is a pain.

Answer 1

Kate in KDE 4 indeed had two tabbar plugins as discussed here.

In Kate 5, these plugins were dropped in favor of a built-in tabbar. This built-in tabbar should be enabled by default and shows the used documents in a most recently used fashion. The tabbar shows as many tabs as fit, and of additional documents are open, then it says e.g. a "+5" to indicate there are 5 more documents that do not fit into the tabbar. You can reach these documents through Ctrl+Tab (if the tab switcher plugin is enabled), or through quick open (Ctrl+Alt+O).

If it's not visible, please try Settings > Show Tabs.

More information on Kate5's tabbar is available here and here (movable tabs).