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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
FocusWriter is a cross-platform tool available to be easily installed on multiple GNU/Linux distributions, as well as Windows and Mac OS.
FocusWriter isn't super powerful, nor is it deeply extensible, but it's not entirely special feature-less either, with the FocusWriter website listing its features as:
- TXT, basic RTF, Docx, basic ODT file support
- Timers and alarms
- Daily goals
- Fully customizable themes
- Typewriter sound effects (optional)
- Auto-save (optional)
- Live statistics (optional)
- Spell-checking (optional)
- Multi-document support
- Sessions
- Portable mode (optional)
- Translated into over 20 languages
The program opens the editing interface in fullscreen on start. All you see on start is a blank text document and a wooden background; no menus, buttons or other interface elements that may get in your way. How do you interact with the program then? How do you exit it, load documents, or change some of the default options? All you need to do is move the mouse cursor to the top of the screen and move it back down a bit afterward.
Because, why not? We haven't had an all-out Vim/Emacs war in a while.
Source: https://www.ghacks.net/2018/05/06/a-look-at-focuswriter-distraction-free-text-editor-on-gnu-linux/
(Score: 3, Funny) by Snow on Tuesday May 08 2018, @10:44PM (32 children)
WIN+R notepad [Enter]. BAM! Glorious, glorious notepad. Black courier text on white background. Even spaces for letters. A row counter AND a line counter?! YES!! It has both. Find things, replace things, write things. It's all good, and notepad has your back.
For everything else there is grep and sed.
(Score: 5, Informative) by bob_super on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:05PM (13 children)
Notepad++, because I get really frustrated without column editing and selected word highlighting.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:35PM (12 children)
-sing Notepad++.
It highlights way too many things. I've gotten some of it to shut off but not enough yet.
Barebones withdrew TextEdit and replaced it with a fully-functional BBEdit demo. After thirty days some of the advances features are disabled but it's still perfectly usable.
I'm going to pay BBEdit's license fee when I get paid Real Soon Now.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:45PM (9 children)
I thought Bare Bones still had a working version of Text Wrangler (I still use it daily for some quick and dirty things). I've been using BBEdit for more than 20 years, though the UI changes in version 10 put me off it quite a bit. That being said BBEdit is certainly worth the money.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 09 2018, @05:12AM (8 children)
I heartily agree. Paying for BBEdit is entered into my budget for my upcoming paycheck.
The chances are quite good that I built my last QA release today. If my client's QA people are happy then I will get a check for More Money Than G-d.
BareBones replaced TextWrangler with the BBEdit demo I think a year ago.
BBEdit r0x0r5 my b0x0r5
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 09 2018, @03:32PM (7 children)
using and especially paying for a proprietary text editor is absurd and shameful.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday May 09 2018, @04:19PM
How absurd, and how shameful? Is it 60/40, or 40/60, or an even 50/50? Maybe closer to 75/25? For my part, I'd go with 70% absurd, and 30% shameful. That money could have been better spent on sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday May 09 2018, @04:20PM (2 children)
Exactly. Why on Earth should people get anything in exchange for the long hours they work to make a convenient, safe, and stable program ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 09 2018, @07:44PM (1 child)
I assume the problem is not in the "paying" part, it's in the "proprietary" part.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Wednesday May 09 2018, @08:18PM
Exactly. Why on Earth should people get anything in exchange for the long hours they work to make a convenient, safe, and stable program ? We gotta punish those acting all uppity and selfish like the fruit of their labor is theirs, and they somehow have a right not to share their source code!
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 09 2018, @10:39PM (2 children)
Get back to me when I can use a Free As In Freedom editor on macOS.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @10:40PM (1 child)
Perhaps the problem is your choice of a propriety, closed OS?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday May 11 2018, @11:23PM
I I once tried to use GEdit for coding, but it had a really lame bug: it deleted all the text that was under the bottom of its window.
I put the Gimp on Bonita's Win2K box. She nearly burst into tears when she tried to use it, then begged me to uninstall it.
She thinks the highly proprietary Pegasus Mail is the best thing since sliced bread.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by urza9814 on Wednesday May 09 2018, @04:48PM (1 child)
I've configured a few custom syntax highlighting templates for Notepad++. Pretty easy to do -- just look under Settings > Style Configurator. If you want a certain element to not be highlighted, just find it and change the colors to your defaults. There's also a bunch of predefined themes if you don't want to spend too much time screwing with it...although while there's some dark themes for the syntax highlighting it doesn't affect the rest of the interface so those tend to look kinda weird...
I'm quite fond of Notepad++, but it's not quite ideal. I use it at work, because we have to use Windows and we can't get just any random software package installed...but at home I much prefer Brackets. My top choice would be Kate, but after I switched away from KDE (I'm using Enlightenment lately) and started having some stability issues with the latest releases I decided to try to switch. Tried at least a dozen different editors, and Brackets was the only one I found tolerable. The biggest issue for me though is the handling of multiple documents. For example, most of my projects have a file in the root named TODO, meaning I might have three or four documents open all with this same name. That means I need to be able to see not just the filename but also the path. But I also don't want to add entire directory structures to my documents list just to open one file. Brackets...doesn't really do that the way I want, but it's the closest compromise I've found.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 09 2018, @05:29PM
I'll give brackets a try
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:16PM (1 child)
> WIN+R notepad [Enter].
CTRL+space n [Enter] [launchy.net]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:51PM
Ctrl + space changes most of my keyboards to Chinese Traditional.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by corey on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:26PM (6 children)
Except if you open a file with \n's instead of \r\n's and its all on one line.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:47PM (5 children)
Exactly. That's when you open the file in WordPad ... ugh :-/
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Wednesday May 09 2018, @02:19PM (4 children)
I just saw a note somewhere that the next version of Notepad actually handles Unix line terminators. Crazy times.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 09 2018, @02:47PM (3 children)
Is there really any reason not to just treat /n as the line terminator and /r as a noop?
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday May 09 2018, @02:57PM
Classic MacOS files? Although they'd be no worse off than UNIX files these days, and probably a lot rarer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline#Representations_in_different_character_encoding_specifications [wikipedia.org] - third row down in the chart
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Wednesday May 09 2018, @03:41PM (1 child)
For those who weren't born with a phone in their hands, you should already know that
\n means New Line: the previous line is done; here begins a new one
\r means Carriage Return: the carriage should move right, placing the typewriter head at the left margin
Now, which one is hopelessly out of touch with what computers have been doing the last few decades?
But Billy Goats (curse his name forever) decided to put BOTH in EVERY text file just because he was too lazy to have his software move the carriage... whenever there still was a carriage.
(Score: 3, Informative) by hendrikboom on Friday May 11 2018, @02:25AM
Officially, the ASCII character designated by \n is a line-feed, and its official meaning is to move the printing position down one line. It is not supposed to go to the beginning of that new line. That's what \r is for. On old teletypes, you started a new line using \r\n. The \r would start the carriage returning; by the time the \n hd finished executing, the carriage would have reached the start of the line. If you coded \n\r, you would run the risk that the first character on the new line would be printed while the carriage was still returning, thus not at the start of the line.
Unix changed this by ignoring standards and established practice arbitrarily designating the line-feed character to mean new line. The device driver would insert any extra characters and delays necessary to get output appearing properly on the physical terminal.
ANSI later introduced an official newline character in the panel of extra control characters they added when they extended ASCII to an eight-bit code. That character has now been stretched to two bytes in UTF-8, but no one uses it.
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:41PM (7 children)
Snow has made himself even more pathetic in my eyes. It is so sad. He forgot to mention what Micro$erf has in your back! (Hint: what has a point and sharp edges and rhymes with "strife"?)
(Score: 2) by Snow on Wednesday May 09 2018, @01:19AM (6 children)
You can hate on MS all you want, but the fact is, the majority of us here are employed to support MS products either directly or indirectly.
Despite having both notepad++ and notepad on my Windows machine at work, I use notepad probably 10 times a day and rarely open notepad++. Notepad is much faster at opening large files, and for the most part works well enough for reading/basic manipulation of text files.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 09 2018, @05:57AM (3 children)
Extraordinary (stupid) claims require extraordinary evidence. Do you have any, Snow? Hairyfeet of the Challenge has not posted in more than a year. Other Microsoft shills, I hear, are being held in dungeons where the wifi signal is sporadic, and they have nothing but Exploder, Notebad, and Edge, mostly to see if, as in the Microsoft Movie, "Saw", they can find a way to kill themselves and thus release them selves from the suffering of being a Microsoft shill. Telemetrics on the demise will of course be uploaded to the Mother-cluster in Redmond, where the Shadows lie.
But, seriously Snow, this is not like your inane "dating" stories. Do you have any evidence that the majority of Soylentils are employed supporting the Great Satan? Or is this just a perverse assumption on your part, and a smear and a slight to the honor of each and every noble Soylentil? I may have to challenge you to a dual.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday May 09 2018, @09:40AM
Anyone with access to S/N Apache's server logs may obtain an estimate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Snow on Wednesday May 09 2018, @03:30PM (1 child)
I find it intriguing that something I have said has triggered you in such a way. My dating style has hit a personal nerve with you. Why is that, and why do you take it so personally? It's as if you feel I am personally attacking you. It's really weird.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday May 09 2018, @04:29PM
That is often times an indication that AC wants you, but doesn't feel that he/she has a chance. Smile, man, you have an anonymousey admirer! Have you been finding any presents in your car, your office, or your home, signed by "Secret Admirer"? Chicks go for that kind of thing. No presents? Then AC is probably a dude.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 09 2018, @08:21AM (1 child)
> Despite having both notepad++ and notepad on my Windows machine at work, I use notepad probably 10 times a day and rarely open notepad++. Notepad is much faster at opening large files, and for the most part works well enough for reading/basic manipulation of text files.
May I suggest trying Notepad2 [flos-freeware.ch]?
I regularly use both Notepad2 and Notepad++. N2 is the replacement for Windows' Notepad, lean and fast, in fact much faster than Notepad. I tested it just now -- for small files, they're both pretty much instant, but for larger files, depending on the file layout, N2 can be 100x faster. I had no problems opening 500MB binaries in N2 (to look for some strings), takes only a few seconds. It also offers stuff like regex search, colored syntax, rudimentary block editing, supports different line endings, etc.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Wednesday May 09 2018, @03:20PM
Very interesting! I'll check it out, thanks!
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Wednesday May 09 2018, @01:23AM
While notepad is suboptimal in nearly every situation, Microsoft does have a nice product that I really enjoy using in Visual Studio Code. It has that nice scrollbar-as-document-preview feature that Kate also has.