Non-root Kate can do everything a root Kate would be able to do. If you opened a file with read-only access, upon saving, it will prompt you for root credentials.
For me not.
Maybe if used within a full-fledged KDE environment.
One does not need a full KDE desktop, only Kate's direct dependencies, which include kio. Then the 'kio-admin' package can be installed and Kate will support admin://.
If you want to open something for which your user doesn't have read access, you need to install the 'kio-admin' package from the repo. And then open that directory or file with the admin:// protocol.
E.g., the following directory is only accessible (readable/traversable) by root:
/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/
Open it by entering the following path in Kate's Open File dialog:
admin:///etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/
Wow. That is much manual overhead.
I usually work at the terminal and type `kate <filename>`.
I don't think it's much overhead. Simply open the file with something like: `kate admin://$(pwd)/filename` You can define an alias function for kate in your shell, and then you can also use the same syntax you already do, `kate filename`. (Or you can make different alias if you want to differentiate, like `kater` for root.) Keeping a root-patched duplicate build on AUR really seems like an overkill, and unnecessary. Also Arch Wiki mentions how it is an anti-pattern to run full GUI applications as root, and lists all the alternative ways of achieving the same goal without such a measure. You can run whatever software you want, but please don't keep this on AUR. It seems you are the only person who uses it. Cheers, Marcell / MarsSeed