I’ve discovered a few neat things in my Internet gleanings this week, like the driving game I mentioned yesterday and Ubiquity (a fascinating Firefox add-on – I expect to post about this one again once I have discovered a few more uses for it).
However, one of the most useful things was lurking not on the Internet but on the hard drive of my Ubuntu Linux (8.04) box at work although it took some web searching to realise it was there. This was Mousepad, a very simple text editor that comes bundled with my desktop environment of choice, XFCE.
Most of my text editing is done with Vim, an excellent and powerful tool for all sorts of text file manipulation. However, some operations, like selecting all the text in a file and copying it to paste to another application (in this case a text box on a web page) took a few more key strokes than I wanted. Enter Mousepad – Ctrl-A to select all the text, a drag and drop across to the waiting text box and then Ctrl-Q back on the Mousepad program to close it down (and open up the next text file queued on the command line).
For most tasks, Vim is superb, but I’m glad to have found a small and simple tool for small and simple jobs to keep alongside it.
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