Re: [gedit-list] Wishlist

[Vasco Alexandre Da Silva Costa <vasc rnl ist utl pt>]

On Tue, 1 Jun 2004, Paolo Borelli wrote:

> On Mon, 2004-05-31 at 19:31 +0100, Vasco Alexandre Da Silva Costa wrote:
> > * rectangular cut & paste.
> > * easy macro learning mode.
>
> I'm not sure these fit into gedit goals of being a *simple* editor...
> maybe they can be implemented as plugins, but I'm not sure it is
> possible. By the way, I'm not convinced of the usefulness of rectangular
> cut&paste... what it is needed for?

Oh, plenty of things. Say you have an ASCII table of something and you
wish to remove one column, or copy one column. For example:

-------------
| 1 | 2 | 3 |
-------------
| 2 | 3 | 4 |
|------------
| 3 | 4 | 5 |
-------------
| 4 | 5 | 6 |
-------------

So I wish to remove the middle column. I select it with a rectangle and
then just press delete. Doing this by hand is extremely cumbersome. This
can also often happen in C programming, if you have well ordered arrays
for example. You can even un-indent code with this without having
selection indentation support. Or:

acum += values.a;
acum += values.b;
acum += values.c;

Say I want to rename values to value, or I wish to copy only the 3rd
column, or only the 3rd column's 2nd and 3rd rows.

There are more examples.

> > * goto matching ().
>
> This belongs to the underlying gtksourceview widget and hopefully it
> will be implemented at some point.

Okay.

> > * lower-case/upper-case.
>
> This has been recently implemented and it is available in cvs HEAD.

Nice!

> > * ability to invoke shell commands.
>
> This is already available in the Shell Command plugin.

Ah yes, I noticed this after I sent my e-mail. It was disabled by default,
along with the indent lines plugin.

Regarding keeping gedit a simple editor... I couldn't agree more! But
simple to use, with an uncluttered interface does not need to clash with
adding these features.

NEdit is also a simple editor, or Amiga's CygnusEd, and both had these
features. They do not add much interface clutter and most important of
all, they are something that is generally useful in most kinds of text
editing. They are not specific to a single language or text format. This
is why I proposed them.

Rectangular selection does not need any menu items. You may wish to add a
"Edit" -> "Paste Column" command like NEdit has, but even without that it
is pretty useful. Regular selection has no menu items either.
If you add the simplest possible macro support, this only needs two menu
items: a toggleable learning on/off that resets history on turn on and a
replay menu item. These could be in their own "Macro" menu. Not much clutter
IMHO, considering the usefulness of this feature.

If you have never seen NEdit, I highly suggest it. It is a very interesting
and simple to use editor. Its major problems are it is done in Motif and
doesn't support anything other than ISO-8859-1:
http://www.nedit.org/

Unfortunately, looking at CygnusEd is more difficult...

---
Vasco Alexandre da Silva Costa @ Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisboa