Re: [gedit-list] My thanks and hoped for improvements to Gedit

[Jesse van den Kieboom <jesse icecrew nl>]

2011/4/22 Rex Welsh <rexwelsh cogeco ca>

Hello gentlemen

I wish to thank you for giving me this great product that has so much potential.

I'm an old amateur Sifi writer that has withdrawal symptoms since leaving WordPerfect and starting on Fedora with your product. I know that Gedit is a text editor not a word processor. The potential is there to make an even better product.

There is no language called plain text but some tricks could go under this heading if it were made.

I stumbled upon the fact that 'Dos Batch' makes my quotes a different colour. This is great for finding missing quotes. Could this be an option under plain text? I don't need the list of reserved words highlighted as well.

You can do this quite easily by making a new language file for your specific purpose. See:

http://developer.gnome.org/gtksourceview/2.10/lang-tutorial.html

and

http://developer.gnome.org/gtksourceview/2.10/lang-reference.html

Also, easiest way to get started is probably to for example copy the dos batch language file and modify it:

cp�/usr/share/gtksourceview-2.0/language-specs/dosbatch.lang ~/.local/share/gtksourceview-2.0/language-specs/mylang.lang

Make sure to change the id, possibly glob and mime type accordingly.

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I'm obliged to make a great many odd names. My stories cover many novels so the list gets quite extensive. Spelling in my native English is difficult enough. I was hoping to find a way of typing a shortcut that brings up a list of names starting with the letter 'A.' The mouse or a keystroke could insert the name in the document. Another shortcut may bring up a list with names, places or things that start with 'B'.

One way of doing this is by using the 'Snippets' plugin which comes by default with gedit. You can enable it through Preferences -> Plugins. You will have to either create separate snippets for all your names (then you can use Ctrl+Space to complete names) or you can make one snippet for each starting letter and use the following snippet contents:

${1:[Aba,Ala,Ada]}

Then, if you type a<tab> in gedit (providing the tab trigger for that snippet is 'a'), you will get a completion popup with the items specified within the square brackets of the snippet.

Another way of doing what you want (which would be a bit better) is to write your own little plugin that can do completion. You can use python (https://live.gnome.org/Gedit/PythonPluginHowTo) and the gtksourceview completion framework (http://developer.gnome.org/gtksourceview/2.10/GtkSourceCompletion.html) to easily provide a list of names to complete (this can then also be interactive, i.e. while you type). If you want, I can help you get started with such a plugin and provide you a small example.

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I use Gedit to read most of my documents even if I have to convert them to text. Being an old fart means I have less cognitive powers. I find a problem on occasion with leaving the right side of one line and starting the line below. Nautilus has a background that alternates one on one. This would be great in Gedit even if it were one on three.

This will be a bit more difficult. I think it can be done, but you will have to write a plugin that overrides drawing the background of the widget. We might consider implementing this natively, but please file a bug report for an enhancement (http://bugzilla.gnome.org)

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Thank you again for making my life richer. Now if I could only find a easy programming language to learn, something that may use an advanced abacus.

Thanks for also making it easy for me to ask these questions.

Rex Welsh
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