Scite replacement

Forum: DSL Ideas and Suggestions
Topic: Scite replacement
started by: Grim

Posted by Grim on April 06 2004,01:59

< Leafpad > will seem familiar to Microsoft users as it's a notepad clone. At 60K Leafpad is just over 750K smaller than Scite and performs admirably as a basic gui text editor. It's only requirements are basic gtk and glib. Oh, and Leafpad remebers you word wrap choice with a simple mouse click. Even after editing the global options for Scite, I can't get it to open up documents with the word wrap turned on. Leafpad makes this a no-brainer.

< Obligatory Screenshot >

Posted by RoGuE_StreaK on April 06 2004,05:53

Don't have DSL booted at the moment, but I remember recently trying to track down why word-wrap wouldn't be remembered under Scite (actually, I quite like scite, good for html editing...)
I think you need to manually edit something in the .scite dir under home/damnsmall, I think the line for word-wrap was commented out...

Posted by hasty on April 06 2004,08:20

Good catch.
I find I've been using scite as a notepad only, lots of cutting & pasting, which is ridiculous given the programming support it has.
Wordwrap for scite is two thirds down the global properties thingy

Posted by TyphoonMentat on April 06 2004,09:20

Unfortunately, it's a GTK+2 based app, making it unsuitable for DSL. Lots of people would probably disagree with removing Scite anyway - for all those that use it as merely a Notepad-clone, there's going to be lots more who use it for programming tasks and need features such as colour-coding.

Posted by hasty on April 06 2004,17:39

Ok had time to check.
For word wrap edit
usr/share/scite/SciTeGlobal.properties
line 117
change to wrap=1

HTH

Posted by cbagger01 on April 06 2004,17:46

If Leafpad does color coded programming highlighting (like for shell script creation), then I would be willing to give it a try.

Scite supposedly has color coding, but the version of Scite that is included with DSL does not do the highlighting correctly. Sometimes it will start color coding and it does not stop color coding at the correct point in the document. This makes the feature useless.

NEdit used to do this perfectly, but Nedit is too large compared to Scite so I understand why Nedit is no longer included in DSL. Maybe the answer is to upgrade Scite to a newer version.

Posted by Grim on April 06 2004,19:02

"Despite its minuscule size it strives to have a functional and easy to use desktop."

As a commandline junkie, I feel two-faced for even saying this but, users should not have to modify config files if they're running from CD. Scite's supposedly "point-click-type" easy but I have to modify a config file just to set word wrap to default, that doesn't say desktop user to me.

I reject the idea that the only reason we continue to use Scite over Leafpad is for programming. If you were seriously doing development work you'd use real development tools, i.e. gcc, g++, gmake, ldd etc., not busybox equivalents or tcc. Personally, if I were editing code I'd have vim and ctags on the CD, but the fact of the matter is, this is a desktop distribution, not a development one.

My wife or brother should feel reasonably comfortable sitting down at a machine running DSL and not get pissed off at something so simple as turning wordwrap on in the text editor.

Posted by Dan on April 06 2004,19:45

Cbagger01, I don't think John can upgrade scite because the later versions are GTK2 based.

Posted by cbagger01 on April 06 2004,23:16

Maybe I am wrong, but I think there are versions of Scite out there between our currently installed version and the first GTK2-only version of Scite. Hopefully, one of these versions includes a fix to the color coding problem.

As for using Scite as a development environment, I agree that we should not expect to use it for c programming, etc when the GCC compiler is not included on the DSL CD.

However, it is possible to do shell scripting or Perl from the DSL CD so this part of the functionality is quite usable. I consider script display/editing to be a basic function of the Linux desktop. But that's just my opinion.

As for the whole Scite Word Wrap thingie:

The maintainers of the distribution can always change the default value for word wrap on the master image so newbies won't have to go and fix it themselves.

Unfortunately, the downside of this is that with word wrap enabled by default, it can screw up some script editing and some cut-and-pastes from the blocks of sample CODE that are posted on this web site.

So my preference is to keep the default, or provide a way to toggle the default via a Fluxbox menu item. It is unfortunate that the Scite folks did not make this function (word wrap on/off) part of the menu bar.

Does anyone know if this menu bar item (word wrap on/off) has been added in future versions of Scite? We can't be the only people who have noticed this functionality gap.

Posted by John on April 07 2004,02:49

The version of scite in DSL *does* have word-wrap on/off, you can select it under the 'Options' menu.

I also use it to get some scrip work done, for general script writing it is my second choice behind nedit. This version of scite may occasionally mess up in it's color coding, but I haven't found it unstable. One day I used it from a DSL CD for over 10 hours without a crash. I don't think it has ever crashed or corrupted a file on me.

Posted by Rapidweather on April 08 2004,03:05

I use scite also, all the time.
I'm using it for my remastering work, but I do not use the advanced programming features in scite.
I'm glad it's in DSL.