Editing configuration files

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 24 Nov 2018 07:21:44 +0000, Colin Law wrote:
>Which version of Ubuntu are you doing that with?  Often running a
>graphic app with sudo will leave root-owned files on your home folder
>which then causes problems.

In my experience _only_ dconf based editors _sometimes_ (not always)
change the owner of /run/user/*/dconf/user,
e.g. /run/user/1000/dconf/user, but files in $HOME aren't affected.

On Fri, 23 Nov 2018 21:40:37 +0000, Colin Law wrote:
>nano is ok for small files but is pretty tedious for large config
>files. Compared to even a simple gui editor like gedit, stuff like
>search and replace for example is not simple unless you use nano all
>the time, which most of us don't.

I'll agree to that.

The Ubuntu package xfe contains /usr/bin/xfwrite, for some, at
least one other distros it's /usr/bin/xfw. It's a GUI editor with a
search and replace option, that doesn't use dconf, so
/run/user/*/dconf/user isn't touched at all and in my experiences
$HOME isn't affected either.

However, even if a config file (perhaps .config/xfe/xfwrc) related to
xfwrite (xfw) in $HOME should be affected, simply make it your root
privileges GUI editor and don't use it as user. Other than dconf, the
xfwrite (xfw) config has got no impact on other apps.