Re: [gedit-list] Gedit for console

["J. M. Rees" <jm07734rees gmail com>]

2014-06-29 7:33 GMT+09:00 James Freer <jessejazza3 uk gmail com>:
> OS is Xubuntu.
>
> Just out of interest... I am not a programmer.
>
> I love gedit as a prose text editor for a writer in the gui. However, I also use the console
> a lot and was wondering how much altering of code would be involved to make gedit a
> console editor as well. It's the wordwrap (softwrap), auto indent and similar features
> which are so useful. Nano, and other console editors don't do softwrap.


I'm not a nano fan, have no idea whether it does what you want, but a
search for "console mode text editor softwrap" brought this page up:

http://www.nano-editor.org/dist/v2.2/nano.html#Feature-Toggles

The "--softwrap" option is the very last one. Is that too new an
option for you to use, or does it fail to do what you need?

> Emacs can be used in either but I find it 'heavy going' - it would be so nice to have all
> the features of gedit but for the console. I use some apps where I have to use Pico
> - as a gui editor makes things awkward. I can use gedit from the command line but
> that's not what I mean. There's no editor I know of that can do wordwrap in the
> console apart from 'heavyweight' Emacs and Vim.

I myself am more-or-less comfortable with vim when I can't get an X11
session up. My favorite text editor was text wrangler, but I haven't
seen Bare Bones releasing the source code yet. The Metrowerks source
code editor was a close second, but it has the same problem.

Hmm. I was never much of a fan of elvis, but then I never knew it had
a hexadecimal mode and such. It has become kind of long-in-the-tooth,
but I think you can still find it in many distro repositories. That's
a vi family editor, but it has an input mode somewhat more effective
than vim's so that you can make the command mode pretty much stay out
of your way.

But I'm pretty sure that there are other console-mode + input-mode
editors that do softwrap and are not as heavy as emacs. I remember DOS
console mode editors with K&R C source, that did softwrap, and the
source code fit easily on a standard 5" floppy. (In other words, less
than 350MB of source.)

> Just an idea and I am sure many folk would also like a console version. One other
> thing that would be nice would be 'mid cursor positioning' which only Emacs and Pico
> do (to the best of my knowledge).

I have thoughts on this, but will defer to the developers.