Ubuntu – True column-mode (block-selection and editing) text editor solution

geditsoftware-recommendationtext-editor

In windows, I used to use a text editor called crimson editor which featured the best column-mode editing support I have yet to use.

When enabled via a simple Alt–C shortcut, selections could be made with the mouse or cursor keys and they would be visual blocks rather than wrapped-lines.

These selections could be deleted, moved, copied, pasted, and all of the operations just made sense. You could also just start typing, and you'd get a column of the characters as you're typing.

There are multiple ways of getting parts of the these features working separately discussed on this forum thread, but no one has yet to provide a solution that provides this all-encompassing and easy-to-use method.

If someone could point me to a gedit plugin where this work is actively being pursued, perhaps I could help with the coding myself. If someone is aware of a text editor that already provides this full functionality, I'd appreciate the info. Running crimson editor through wine and the close-but-not-quite multi-edit plugin for gedit are the temporary solutions I'm 'getting by with' for the time being.

UPDATE (2012-11): I'm now a very happy user of sublime text. It supports excellent column-mode editing and works on all three major OS platforms without any issue. Highly recommended!

Best Answer

geany Install geany

is an integrated development environment that provides good column editing support which is worth checking out (an example here)

Simply put, press down Alt+Shift instead of just Shift while making selections to invoke column mode. One important limitation is that the edits in column mode are (as yet) not undo-able.

To achieve the same with the mouse, hold down Ctrl while selecting. This actually works with most Scintilla-based editors (including SciTE and Geany).

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Ubuntu – Text editor with multi-pattern search and replace at once

...why not use a script? Check xclip (sudo apt-get install xclip)

 xclip -o -selection clipboard

will send the clipboard to standard output, and with -i you can replace the clipboard. So

 xclip -o -selection clipboard | sed "s/change this/to this/" | xclip -i -selection clipboard

will apply the change to the selection, and now you can paste it.

If you want a graphical thing, you can embed the script with yad:

#! /bin/bash 
#
yad --title Choose --button One:1 --button Two:2 --button Three:3
choice=$?
case $choice in
        1) 
        xclip -o -selection clipboard | 
                sed "s/one/uno/" | 
                xclip -i -selection clipboard
        xclip -o selection clipboard
        ;;
        2)      
        xclip -o -selection clipboard | 
                sed "s/two/dos/" | 
                xclip -i -selection clipboard
        xclip -o selection clipboard
        ;;
        3)
        echo "executing 3 --- well, you got the idea"
        ;;
esac

That will show you a dialog like this:

YAD example

Notice that the script will both modify the clipboard (paste) buffer and print it. To embed this in an editor, for example vim, you can do the following:

Add to your .vimrc:

nmap <F4> :r ! /path/to/the/script <CR>

run for example gvim.
Now you copy the text, go the the editor, press F4. Choose the change you want to apply.
The text will appear in the editor. If it's ok as is, you can paste it. Otherwise
Edit the text and copy it again. (In gvim, you can select the text with the mouse and simply choose paste --- or learn the vim commands, whatever).

It could be optimized for sure (you probably can easily define another key to select and paste the modified text so that you have even less keypress to use)

Ubuntu – Gedit won’t let me change the text size: stuck in giant text mode

It sounds similar to this problem: gedit "Manage External Tools" menu option doesn't appear

Use namei to find if sudo owns some of your configuration files:

$ namei -l ~/.config/gedit/tools
f: /home/rick/.config/gedit/tools
drwxr-xr-x root root /
drwxr-xr-x root root home
drwxr-xr-x rick rick rick
drwx------ rick rick .config
drwxr-xr-x root root gedit
drwxrwxr-x rick rick tools

If you see root appear as owner or group (after the first two directories, / and home) then use this command:

sudo chown -cR user:user /home/user

Where user is your user ID. ie Max:Max /home/Max

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – Text editor with multi-pattern search and replace at once

Ubuntu – Gedit won’t let me change the text size: stuck in giant text mode

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