On Thu, Jul 02, 2026 at 05:33:57 -0600, D. R. Evans wrote: > Greg Wooledge wrote on 7/1/26 8:19 PM: > > > > > Without -b, we can deduce that the Kate command line process is > > sending the edit request to an "already running Kate instance", and > > then terminating, at which point crontab checks the file, sees no > > change, and reports the lack of changes, leaving the installed crontab > > unchanged. > > Yes... except that I wasn't using any other instance of kate, so it's still > not entirely clear (to me, anyway) why I had to change the value of $VISUAL. > [Something to do with the way the editor is invoked by crontab, perhaps?] > > I now have this issue filed in my voluminous mental "I don't understand > this, but I have other things I need to worry about" file.
Try running "kate -n" or maybe "kate -n /tmp/xxx" in a terminal and see what happens. Does it open a GUI window and then give you a new shell prompt in the terminal immediately? Then, try adding the -b option and see how that changes the behavior.
