Ubuntu – Using gedit in Ubuntu

12.04gedit

I use gedit for files that I also need in Windows. For the files, I use the Windows-1250 code page. In the Ubuntu, I paste texts and sometimes after that I cannot save the file in the 1250 code page. I wish to continue editing such file opened with the Windows-1250 encoding, but to display it in a way that shows the characters that I need to correct (manually) to be able to save the file in the desired code page. I have seen such displaying for other files, where the "bad" character is displayed as a 4 numbers square table, but I cannot achieve such displaying intentionally. Is it possible? How?
Thanks.

Best Answer

You can open a text file with that encoding this way:

gedit --encoding=WINDOWS-1250 myFile.txt

If you wish gEdit to use this encoding by default you can change the way it starts in the Main Menu application (search for it with the Lens). Then go to:

Applications > Accessories > Text Editor

and click "Properties". In the "Command" text box insert the following:

gedit --encoding=WINDOWS-1250 %U

and then click "Close" and "Close" again.

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Ubuntu – gedit can’t recognize character encoding, but gvim can

iconv is probably what you'll want to use. iconv -l will show you the available encodings and then you can use a couple of commands to recode them all:

# all text files are in ./originals/
# new files will be written to ./newversions/

mkdir -p newversions
cd originals
for file in *.txt; do
    cat $file | iconv -f ASCII -t utf-8 > ../newversions/$file;
done

If you want to do this with files you don't the encoding of (because they're all over the place), you want to bring in a few more commands: find, file, awk and sed. The last two are just there to process the output of file.

for file in find . -type f -exec file --mime {} \; | grep "ascii" | awk '{print $1}' | sed s/.$//; do
    ...

I've no idea if this actually works so I certainly wouldn't run it from anything but the least important directory you have (make a testing folder with some known ASCII files in). The syntax of find might preclude it from being within a for loop. I'd hope that somebody else with more bash experience could jump in there and sort it out so it does the right thing.

Ubuntu – How to tell Gedit which syntax highlighting to apply

Yes you can go to

View -> Highlight mode -> Select which one you need

Best Answer

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