[Newbies] mucking around in .changes file on linux/ubuntu

[Enrico Schwass]

Jerome Peace <peace_the_dreamer at yahoo.com> writes:

Hello,

emacs can do what you want.

Try this sequence 

Ctrl-x Enter R

to revisit a file in different encoding

dos, unix, windows might help as a start, use tab-completion for more

Furthermore you can use Alt-% to replace unprintable characters.

Dont know its worth, but you could implement a whole squeakbin emacs
mode to do regular editings.

hexl-mode is useful to see a file as hex dump

hth
Enno

> At some point in making and finding bugs, I am left with having to
> pick up pieces. On my mac I could always just read the whole changes
> file into a text editor and extract manually the tail bit.
>
> Having moved on to Ubuntu 8.04 my tools don't seem to match my needs.
>
> The Gedit editor refuses to read the text because it is in a format it
> can't decode. It tries Utf-8 and latin1.
>
> The Emacs editor will gladly read in the file but because the line
> endings are cr rather than crlf I get a file all on one line.
>
> My emacs skills are rusty so I've not figured out what to do next.
>
> Is there anyone out there who has deal with changes files and linux
>editors? What might work most elegantly or robustly?
>
> Yours in curiosity and service, --Jerome Peace