GXedit User Manual

                          Revision 1.22
                                
                                
                                
                                
                                
                                








© 1998-99 Patrick Lambert <drow@darkelf.net>
http://devplanet.fastethernet.net/gxedit.html








                          General help

Syntax:
gxedit [text files] [-v] [-f] [-n] [-i] [-d] [-r] [-p project]
[-s script]


The -v option is used to open the file in view only mode.

The -f option disables the menus and toolbars

The -n option disables the networking part. Useful if you do not
have access to a network.

The -i option waits for input. Useful with tail -f

The -d option gives debug information on startup

The -r option resets the config file

The -p option loads a project file on startup

The -s option loads a script on startup


The compilation of GXedit is very simple. You need to run ./setup
and then a graphical setup box will appear. You can also
customize compilation-time variables. To run Gxedit, simply type
the syntax above.

GXedit is a graphical multi function text editor. It allows you
to edit text in a X Window program.

You can call all the available GXedit functions from the menus.
Also, you can use the toolbars for functions like Open and Exit.

The main toolbar's icons, in order, are:

New, Open, Save, Copy, Paste, Settings, Help, Exit.    

You'll notice that from the File menu you can import various
formats. These commands use simple converters to convert a
foreign format to plain text. It might not be completely
accurate, but it makes it easier to read if you have no program
that natively reads that file format. The converting functions
should get better in next versions. Also other import programs
can be used as import filters can be added from the settings
panel.

From the Edit menu, you can Copy and Paste text, Find strings,
and you can include man tags in your text.

The Edit menu also has an Undo command, that will restore the
text as it was just before you used a scripting command, a macro
or checked spelling.

An interesting thing you will find is the mirror features. With
them, you can set your GXedit as a server where other people
using the program on other systems will be able to connect to
yours, and see everything you type as you type it. It allows up
to 99 connections. This can be very useful for a meeting across
the Internet or on a LAN.

Note that the data is not encrypted and anyone can connect if
they know the server/port. Use only on a local LAN if sensitive
data will be sent.

From the Links menu, you can open your text in various other
programs. You can also run Gxedit scripts from there.

There is also the Options menu for various tools like spell
checking. It's also there that will appear the GXedit scripts you
can add in the settings panel.

The lines count, word count and bytes count are approximate.

Finally, the Help menu provides this help screen.

GXedit also has an autosave feature that can save your text in
~/.gxedit.autosave while you're writing, until you exit GXedit,
in case something crashes. You can turn this on or off in the
settings panel. You can reload the autosave file from within
Edit/Undo.

It also has a debug window. Major notices will appear in a
message box, but other ones will appear in the debug window.

Note that while this is a text editor, if you try to load images,
an image viewer will be called to load them. You can set your
image viewer in the settings panel.

You should not confuse the Add man tags option and the Import man
page option. One is to make a man page and will insert 'tags' in
your text, while the other will load a man page and convert its
tags to plain text.

GXedit now provides syntax highlighting. For this you need to
install the GtkEditor patch to GTK
(http://www.daimi.aau.dk/~mailund/gtk.html) and enable it in the
Settings panel and at compile time. Note that GtkEditor is in
early alpha and syntax highlighting is not very stable.



                                
                         Network options

GXedit is fully network aware. You can load an e-mail from your
e-mails folder, send your current text as e-mail, load a text
from the web, and more.

All these functions are available from the menus.

Note that you'll want to configure your settings correctly before
using any network function.

Also, the News fetching may be slow when Gxedit needs to fetch
the complete newsgroups list.


                                
                                
                         Settings panel

The settings panel can be accessed from the Options menu or from
the toolbar.

The settings are kept in a files called .gxedit* in your home
directory, and the main file is created the first time you start
GXedit.

There are several panels. The display settings are easy to set
up. The advanced panel can be left unchanged, but you have to
configure the networking part.

The advanced panel is for fonts and colors. Interesting fonts
include 'misc fixed', 'adobe courier', 'adobe helvetica' and 'b&h
lucida'. Check with xfontsel to get your fonts list.

If you don't know what your mail server or e-mail address is, you
should ask your system administrator.

Note that if the Reply option is on, any mail or news article
will be opened with a reply char '>' and ~/.signature will be
appended at the end of the text, to allow easy replying.

The auto indent option means that the indent level will go up
when you add a { and go down when you type }.

The importing filters are simple filters used to add choices to
the Import menu. If you have binaries on your system that convert
a file format to plain text, like dvi2tty does, then you can use
a filter to add an import option to GXedit. In the filter line,
$i means the input file and $o the output one. GXedit will
replace them as needed. The default choices are dvi to text, RPM
file info and more. This obviously means that you must have
dvi2tty and RPM installed on your system.

The last panels are Editing and Menus. From them, you can toggle
on or off the option to have bolded menu and toolbar text, the
Audio menu, and other misc things.

The Audio menu choices require you to type 'make say' and 'make
say-install' in the GXedit source tree. The say utility is based
on rsynth. See the README in the access dir for more.

You can compile GXedit to access a SOCKS proxy server (with the
proxy option on) if you define USE_SOCKS and link with the SOCKS
static lib.


                                
                                
                                
                           Keybindings

The key bindings are now based on the F keys. For example, F1 n
starts a new instance of GXedit. See the Quick Reference Card for
a complete list (quickref.ps)

The F keys are defined in config.h, and right now relies on GDK
to provide the right codes on the keyboard. If they don't work,
try to modify them in the config file. 





                           Encryption

GXedit can use the des(1) or idea(l) binary to encrypt and
decrypt text files. The DES binary is part of the libdes library
and can be found at ftp://ftp.psy.uq.oz.au/pub/Crypto/DES/ while
IDEA is available from
ftp://idea.sec.dsi.unimi.it/pub/crypt/code/

The encryption is based on key using. You encrypt a file with a
key, and decrypt it with the same key. The encrypted text is
saved under filename.enc

Note that this encryption could possibly be broken by powerful
computers, even if IDEA is more secure then what DES can offer.
Also, since GXedit uses temporary files, the text is not secure
on the computer where GXedit is used, only wherever you send the
.enc file. Also make sure the key doesn't appears in logs like
.bash_history

The encryption command can be useful for data storage, or for
sending a text over an insecure network.

Also note that this is not compatible with SunOS's default des(1)
binary. See the des(1) and idea(l) man pages for more
information.





                         GXedit scripts

GXedit scripts must not be confused with AWK and SED support in
GXedit.

The scripts are used to add functions in the menu Links. With
them, you can call other programs, shell commands, and bring that
text back into GXedit.

An example script is in userinfo.scr, and you can add scripts to
GXedit in the settings panel, Misc tab.

The script can contain any of those 4 commands:
  command:        which is used to execute a shell command
  command-bg:     which also calls a command but in the
                  background
  open-file:      this command opens a file
  open-file-new:  open a new GXedit window to open the text file
  chdir:          Change the current directory

To include a script in GXedit, from the settings panel, you
include this syntax:
script: <number> <script filename> <description>

The following are variables you can use on the command and
command-bg lines:
  !tmpname        Temp name
  !login          Login name
  !images         Images viewer
  !program        GXedit program name
  !mail-server    Mail server name
  !news-server    News server name
  !file-manager   File manager
  !documents-dir  Your documents dir
  !gzip           GZ compress program
  !compile        Your set compile line
  !xterm          The Xterm program

This version of GXedit comes with gtk-shell, a useful utility to
provide visual queries and messages to the user, to be used in
the scripts (see userinfo.scr)



                                
                                
                      AWK and SED scripting

The scripting function in the Options menu can be very useful for
complex text manipulation.

The scripting languages chosen in GXedit are Awk and Sed, because
those languages go well together to manipulate text.

Let's see some examples of what you could do with Awk. Open the
README file and use the scripting command:
/is/
This will remove every line that does not have 'is' in it.

On the contrary, if you want all the lines that do not contain
'is', you would use:
!/is/

If you wanted the pattern to match both 'is' and 'Is', you could
have used:
/[iI]s/

Let's take another example:
{ count=count+1 } END { print count }

Always remember that anything before BEGIN and after END is
executed once, while what's between the two is executed for every
line of text. So this command means add 1 to the variable count
for every line of text, and when all lines have been counted,
print the variable. The result is Awk will print the number of
lines.

Now let's say you want to change all your text to upper-case
chars. Awk has a function called toupper() to do that. So the
proper command line would be:
{ print toupper($0) }

Where $0 means the complete line, and $1 would mean the first
word of that line, $2 the second word, etc...

Let's say that you need a quick way to get all the real names of
all users on the system. Open /etc/passwd then use this script:
BEGIN { FS=":" } { print $5 }
This tells awk to use ':' between the words, and to print word 5
of every line.

Another way to do it is:
{ print $5 }
 with:
-F:
In the 'Optional flags' entry box.

Another interesting command is length. This command line will
print every line with at least 10 chars in it:
length > 10

This command will print the total amount of chars (letters or
spaces) in your text:
{ count=count+length($0) } END { print count }

Also, this command will count the number of times the word 'is'
can be found and print the result:
{ for (i=1; i<=NF; i++) if ($i=="is") count=count+1 } END { print
count }

Finally, you might need to add a flag to the Optional flag entry
box. If you want to see all the hidden chars like EOL, then enter
the letter l in the command line, and -n in flags.





                            Copyright

GXedit is Copyright 1998-99 Patrick Lambert <drow@darkelf.net>

Available at http://devplanet.fastethernet.net
or http://mirrors.darkelf.net
or http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux
                              
You can freely use and distribute this program following the GPL
license available in the file COPYING.

I'd like to thank everyone who gave me ideas and provided
comments about GXedit, especially Glen Parker.

See the source code for other possible credits.