text editing in ubuntu

[Rashkae]

steve wrote:

> could any one recommend a fairly advance means of editing text that doesn't 
> involve an immense learning curve, never mind drag and drop, but visual word 
> wrap would be good.
> 
> all tips gratefully received.
> 
> steve
> 
> maschino maschino yello 
> 


I really don't know what is causing all this loss of focus weirdness.
Presumably, there is something stealing the focus, and that's what needs
be dealt with.  (what is this I-beam?)

There might also be some window manager options to control how window
focus behaves, but are you using the standard Ubuntu Gnome desktop? Do
you have desktop effects turned on?

As far as text wrapping goes, you need to specify what kind of text
wrapping you want.  There are two definitions of text wrapping, but the
terminology varies depending who you ask.

There's hard wrapping, where the text editor automatically inserts a
<cr> character at the end of the line.  You don't see this kind of text
wrapping too often anymore.  Most text display applications are expected
to display text fitted to the window without the creator fixing the
column width at 76 characters.  When I need a hard wrapped text
document, I usually use emacs, but the KDE text editors also had that
functionality. (I use kate, sorry, I'm not sure if that's still
available in KDE 4, or if there is a new default).  In the Kate Editing
options, this is called static word wrap.

The other kind of word wrapping is dynamic.  The lines are not actually
split in the source file, but the text is word wrapped on your screen at
whatever window size allows.  All text editors, including gedit, can do
this.  Edit - Preferences and check "Enable text wrapping"

The only GUI e-mail program I can enjoy using since migrating from mutt
is Thunderbird, and it rocks by a wide margin. It is, however, a  memory
hog if you are trying to run a minalist system.