I too encountered this behavior, and it's related to a bug I encountered earlier when trying to open kwrite instead of kate in kubuntu 7.10.
Everytime kwrite was opened (but not kate) , I would get a permission error on the file ~/.kde/share/config/kwriterc stating, more or less, that any configuration changes i made would not be saved. It turns on that my kubuntu install had set the file to be owned by root. Changing the owner to my username/group ('sudo chown myusername:myusername ~/.kde/share/config/kwriterc') made the error disappear. While I could change many settings in kwrite without problem, changing text colours and syntax highlighting colours was problematic as the colours would not change with the 'apply' button. I decided to try to do the same kate, and experienced the exact same problem (I believe kwrite is a simplified version of kate that still uses many kate configuration files, or something like that.) Investigation of file permissions in ~/.kde/share/config revealed three of kate's configuration files were also set to root; katepartindentjscriptrc katepartluaindentscriptrc katesyntaxhighlightingrc I believe that while kateschema controls the background colour et. al., katesyntaxhighlightingrc controls all text colouring. I changed the permissions of all three back to my account, and presto, now I can change colours! I suspect only katesyntaxhighlightingrc is needed, but I also think that changing the permissions on the other two would fix future grief if I ever had to change the default indentation. Aside: In total, my installation had nine files in ~/.kde/share/config that had root permissions. The other four are: knetworkconfrc adept_batchrc adept_installerrc adept_updaterrc My problems using adept (while not signifigant as I don't use it much) went away after I changed the adept_* file permissions. Also, the inconsistencies I've noticed (settings didn't always save) when setting the network up manually (static IP) in the KDE control center disappeared after changing the permissions on knetworkconfrc. I'm sure the file permissions are not applied as such on all kubuntu 7.10 installs (or these bugs would be far more widespread), so I'm looking for the common denominator. The only thing I can think of is, I experienced the 'Kicker adds _: Entries in K-menu: to certain programs', (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kdebase/+bug/135084) which was linked to application of kde settings from the en_CA (and others) locales. What locales are you using? -- Kate (?and Quanta and KDevelop user preferences) do not save https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/173283 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Kubuntu Team, which is a bug contact for kdebase in ubuntu. -- kubuntu-bugs mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/kubuntu-bugs