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

Chris Kassopulo ckasso at sprynet.com
Sun Feb 14 19:11:24 UTC 2010


On Sun, 14 Feb 2010 01:26:13 -0500, Jerome Peace  
<peace_the_dreamer at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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

Try "scite" (available through Synaptic). It is a programming editor that
handles EOL more gracefully. You can save a file preserving or changing  
line
end coding.

 From their documentation:

view.eol
Setting this to 1 makes SciTE display the characters that make up line  
ends.
This looks similar to (CR), (LF), or (CR)(LF). This is useful when using  
files
created on another operating system with software that is picky about line  
ends.

eol.mode
The default EOL mode (characters that make up line ends) depends on your  
platform.
You can overwrite this behaviour by setting the property to
     LF for UNIX format
     CR for Macintosh format
     CRLF for DOS/Windows format
As you see, Windows combines the best of the other worlds ;-)

eol.auto
This setting overrides the eol.mode value and chooses the end of line  
character
sequence based on the current contents of the file when it is opened. The  
line
ending used the most in the file is chosen.

It also does syntax highlighting and recognizes smalltalk although I've  
never
tried it.

Chris



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