[gedit-list] Frustrations with opening text files from elsewhere

[Doug McNutt <douglist macnauchtan com>]

I am getting ready to do some travelling.  I'm taking my Samsung  netbook with me and it's been updated to gedit 2.30.2.  My older box has not yet been updated and is on Ubuntu 10.4, I think.  It had some problems with AMD 64 bit and the update got delayed.

gedit is giving me real pains when I want to transfer ASCII text files from this Macintosh running OS 9.  They typically arrive with Mac \0D line ends but are otherwise simple ASCII 7 bit text.  No UTF-8 and nothing requiring any extended 8 bit stuff. I wouldn't mind just not displaying unrecognized characters but. . .

gedit just won't open the files!  It won't even try! That's inexcusable.  I wouldn't mind if the display looked funny if I could only use gedit to replace \r with \n. Generating a red  "I can't do it" box without at least a button for  "do the best you can" is just not helpful.  Yeah I have written a quickie perl script that does the job for me but come on;  gedit ought to allow for that.

I have also seen similar problems when LiveHTTP headers saves files with \0D\0A pairs,

Also, being a Mac developer until  neXt's X-code turned me off, I just don't like having the menu items disappear and come back only when I drag the mouse first over the name - Text Editor -.  Nothing else uses the screen space. Why can't I view the menus?  I use Tools_External tools all the time and I was disturbed when my personal tools became a sub menu. Now it's yet another step to mouse around for them.

And that strange vertical scroll  needs to be optional or it needs to work the same way other applications do. Was there something wrong with a good old scroll bar the way Terminal does it.

An workarounds?


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1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry.