UltraEdit-like text editor

Hi all,

as a newby, I'm trying to make the most out of my past programmer experience, as Windows and Unix developer, but I'm missing a text editing tool that was really simple and powerful: UltraEdit.
Most of all, I'm missing the "column mode", that allows the user selecting a portion of the text in a kind of vertical mode, a quick compare, flexibled color highlite, hex editing (not a hit, isn't it?) and the capability of editing huge files.

Is there anything that can be used in place of it under Linux?

Thanks a lot in advance.
Cheers.

 

I don't know if you like my answer, but most things you mentioned can be done very quickly and efficiently in the bash shell and with the most common command line tools. This is basic Unix and Linux command line and text file processing. Actually I know no GUI tool that would match the capabilities of the command line.

 

Thanks jukk,

I've used vi and I liked it very much, but the AA1 keyboard does not really provide that kind of precision. A GUI could be a better way to deal with that kind of issues.
In general, I do not like that much to use keyboard shortcuts on AA1.

Cheers.

 

vi and emacs is one thing of course, but you can do just about anything with commands like grep, sort, less, awk and sed, to mention a few. But of course, if there is a GUI alternative, I would be interested, too. I've been living on the command line (well rather in screen) on different linux servers for about ten years, with occasional linux desktop tryouts, until now when I bought the AA1.

 

Something like the wonderful PFE (Programmers File Editor) for windows would be great. I don't really want to open the writer in
Open Office which is a bit slow to get started and way too sophisticated for the odd note or even program one wants to write. The
Notes thingy under work is just plain silly.

 

What about xemacs? Or is that overkill?

 

Definitely love SciTE for extended text-file editing!

 

I think geany does most, if not all, of what you need.

 

Thanks chaps - I tried both geany and SciTE which ran fine - both are a little more than I needed and a chap here at work
suggested Gedit which I have downloaded and will run from within a terminal window but, try as I might, including writing
a gedit.desktop cannot get to run from either the menu or desktop.

 

Where is your gedit.desktop file located? Why don't you post it here and maybe someone can see why it isn't working.

Cheers.

 

That's right, check your .desktop file.

It's usually found in /usr/share/applications. The file appears as "Text Editor" with the file manager but the real name is "gnome-gedit.desktop" .

Delete the line "OnlyShowIn=GNOME" if it is in the file.

 

That's jolly decent of you. It's below. The gedit.png is the logo from their webpage reduced down to 30x20 pixels - about 1k.
both files are in /usr/share/applications with the other desktop files and a few other png files.

Desktop Entry
Type=Application
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=gedit
Coment=Simple text editor
GenericName=Text Editor
Exec=/usr/bin/gedit
Icon=gedit.png
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
MimeType=text/plain
Categories=Application;Utility;TextEditor

 

brilliant thanks, I didn't need to create my own after all.