Excellent!  I'll give this a try.

On 2016-12-17 09:16:20 Stefan Krusche wrote:
> After a little experimenting I found this workaround:
>
> 1) Start with pristine kate config dir
>
> cp ~/.trinity/share/apps/kate{,orig}
>
> 2) Open kate with no arguments and close it
>
> 3) Open ~/.trinity/share/apps/kate/sessions/default.session with an editor
> and change these options to "false" and save file.
> Kate-MDI-Sidebar-Visible=false
> Kate-MDI-ToolView-kate_filelist-Visible=false
>
> 4) Next time you open kate it will neither show the side bar nor the
> document list.