From: Sanity in Anarchy (sanity@dog.com)
Date: Mon Mar 04 2002 - 04:41:29 GMT
I'd like to see that, too, but to me it's more important to have things like
tables, if only for total compatability with Word documents. (Of course, I
don't want vb support, and a lot of Word features I'd rather have translated
into images, but tables are a simple enough request, I think.)
As for me, my favorite text editors of all time are still vi/vim and gedit.
Although gedit supports drag-and-drop, I really don't use that too much. The
keyboard is still the fastest way to do a lot of things. Learn it. For
example, in almost all GUI text editors and entry fields: Hold shift and move
the cursor (the text-entry cursor, not the mouse cursor) from point A to B,
and all text in between those points will be selected. Move the cursor either
with the arrow keys, with Home and End for the beginning and end of a line,
respectively, or Ctrl+Home or End to go to the beginning or end of a document.
So to delete from the current cursor position (where you're typing now) to the
end of a document, go Ctrl+Shift+End, then Backspace, Delete, or Ctrl+X (to
cut it, ctrl+c is copy and ctrl+v is paste) depending on your needs at the
moment. So drag and drop editing could actually be quicker sometimes. For
example, to change
doSomethingWith (a);
int a;
to
int a;
doSomethingWith (a);
all you have to do is go to one of the lines, go to the beginning of that line
with home and select to the end of the line (often including the newline) with
shift+end, then hit ctrl+x, go to where it needs to go (a couple taps of the
arrow keys at most) and hit ctrl+v. The only disadvantage is when you've
already cut something that you need to paste somewhere before you do that, but
most Unix text editors have more than one "clipboard" on which to store
things.
With practice, this is much faster for me than reaching over to the mouse,
selecting the line, clicking somewhere in the middle of it, and dragging it to
the requisite place.
The mouse will never be made obsolete by the keyboard, but it should be viewed
less as an essential part of the computer and more as a last resort. I only
even use XWindows when I want to see nice graphics, and usually what I'm using
it for is to give bash a nice background!
>===== Original Message From peter@ranui.org.nz =====
>By drag and drop I mean, being able to highlight a word or words then
>drag it to another place in the document without using cut and paste.
>Because you are pasting (usually) whole words, then the insertion if
>necessary of an extra space is intuitive and sensible.
>
>To be honest im a bit stunned that looking back the lest several
>months of of the archives of this list i find no record of this as a
>requested feature, (nor is on the 10 most wanted list) because it is
>such an intrinsic part of text edting. Even code editers like TextPad
>have it, and when coding I appreciate this a lot.
>
>P
>
>
> > >The one thing I *would* like is drag and drop editing. That to me is
>a
>>
>> the Gnome version have better drag and drop functionality. im not sure
>> exactly what you mean by 'drag and drop editing'.
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