text editing in ubuntu

NoOp glgxg at sbcglobal.net
Tue Aug 4 18:55:39 UTC 2009


On 08/04/2009 06:23 AM, Rashkae wrote:
...
> 
> 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.

With gedit the issue seems to be the inability to easily set the word
wrap to a specific column width, see:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gedit/+bug/329500
[Gedit does not wrap around the right margin]
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=572860
[Word Wrap by right margin]
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gedit/+bug/335679
[gedit ignores text wrapping settings when printing]

However, there is a way to work around this - giving the visual effect
of hard wraps. I typically like to keep to an 80 column margin. So I set
preferences to show the right margin at 80.  I then resize the window
width to 80 columns & type away with word wrap turned on. Now of course,
if I maximize the window again the lines are displayed at, in my case,
99 columns. That's basically the same thing that 'Notepad' in Windows
does when you turn word wrap on and or resize the Notepad window.

@steve (OP): gedit is quite sophisticated. You might have a look at:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/gedit
http://live.gnome.org/Gedit/Plugins
  http://hartmann-it-design.de/gedit/TextWrap/










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