text editing in ubuntu

steve utopia_beach at blueyonder.co.uk
Wed Aug 5 01:33:36 UTC 2009


Rashkae wrote:

>>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

hi Rashkae

first let thank everyone else their for their excellent suggestions. i'm 
responding to your message because i think you have helped me realize what 
may be occuring with regard to the loss of focus issue and other problems.

i'm running ubuntu netbook remix 9.01 with desktop enhancement features 
turned on, almost defintely a mistake. screen real-estate is a real issue 
with a netbook. evolution is not really usable on a 1024x600 screen - too 
much space taken up by unnecessary grey borders, not enough space for the 
windows that matter, like message list and message content. thats why i'm 
using kmail at the moment.

i thought i'd uninstall evolution but when i tried it synaptic said it would 
need to uninstall ubuntu netbook remix too! i now realize that this means 
i'd lose the ability to click on configuration dialogs in order to access 
those parts of those dialog which would be off-screen on a 1024x600 display. 
i got fed up with that system anyway and solved it by rotating my screen by 
90 degrees thus avoiding the off-screen tab and space-bar fandango because 
mouse clicks just switch from top of dialog to bottom of dialog. i'm sure 
i'm not the only one having these problems. i suspect that the netbook remix 
is stealing focus innappropriately on occasion. if anyone thinks this is 
nonsense please chime in.

>>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?)

an I-beam cursor is a cursor is a cursor in the shape of a capital i if you 
type a capital i in a non-propotional font like courier new, for example. an 
i-beam being a metal girder of that shape in cross-section. the I-beam 
cursor is usually seen in text editing applications, in my experience.

>>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?

i've not had time to google the various aspects of my new OS thus far, but i 
suspect that desktop effects plus netbook remix equals strange behaviour in 
certain situations for netbook users.

>>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"

it occurs to me that i'm trying to edit a file with windows line endings, a 
file copied from an email from a windows user, could that be important? i 
don't see an option in gedit to change that. i recall seeing that option in 
other editors.

thank you very much for a masterclass on wordwrap. i've always tried to do 
it the old newsgroup way, even in email. but must confess to never having 
understood how it actually worked. i have had wordwrap tuned on. it's 
working beautifully in kmail as i type tonight. i've lost focus and saved 
and re-opened a couple of times. i'm going to try turning off desktop 
effects and maybe i'll uninstall netbook remix, whatever that actually is. 
i'll let you all know how i get on. it could be useful for other netbook 
users. 

>>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.

i've tried thunderbird but again it is wasteful on desktop real-estate. 
thank you so much Rashkae, and everyone.

steve













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