ReText (Text Editor For MarkDown Syntax) Now Supports Tabs, Live Previews, More

ReText is a simple text editor for MarkDown syntax that supports some popular formats such as PDF, ODT, HTML and plain text. Using ReText you can even export your documents to Google Docs (but for now, each export creates a new document).

Since our last post about it, ReText got some very interesting new features:

• Tabs support
• "Live preview" (screenshot)
• Ability to select the default font
• Showing Markdown documentation on first run
• "Web-pages generator"
• Better highlighter for HTML
• KDE integration
• Lots of other changes

The ReText wiki provides a short how-to for using the new "web pages generator" feature.


Here are some screenshots featuring the latest ReText 1.0 under GNOME and KDE:

Install ReText 1.0 in Ubuntu

Add the ReText PPA and install the latest ReText 1.0 in Ubuntu 11.04, 10.10 and 10.04 using the commands below:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mitya57
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install retext

Download ReText 1.0 source code.

Thanks to Dmitry Shachnev for the info and second screenshot!

UMPlayer Update; Sublime Text 2 Gets Solarized [WebUpd8 PPA]

UMPlayer

UMPlayer is a new cross-platform SMPlayer fork. Since it uses Mplayer, it can play most video formats and comes with some very interesting features. For instance, it supports CSS skins so it's very easy to theme.

I've updated UMPlayer to revision 143 in the WebUpd8 PPA - this update brings a feature many have been asking for in the comments: the time position in the video is now remembered (thanks to Steve for the tip!).

Install UMPlayer in Ubuntu 11.04, 10.10 and 10.04:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install umplayer

Sublime Text 2

Sublime Text 2 is a TextMate-like text editor currently in alpha which is now available for Linux too (as well as Windows and Mac OSX).

Sublime Text 2 has also been updated to the latest rev but besides this, I've also incorporated Solarized dark and light color schemes with the Sublime Text 2 package. I've also announced this on ppa.webupd8.org but I felt this deserves a mention on WebUpd8 too.

What's "Solarized"? Check out our previous post: Solarized: A Must Have Color Scheme For Gnome Terminal, Vim, Gedit And Lots More

Install Sublime Text 2 in Ubuntu 11.04, 10.10 and 10.04 using the commands below:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/sublime-text-2
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sublime-text-2

To get the new Solarized color schemes for Sublime Text 2 (Sublime Text 2 supports TextMate color schemes so these are TextMate color schemes) you may have to either purge the previous Sublime Text 2 (sudo apt-get purge sublime-text-2) and then reinstall or manually remove the config folder (~/.config/sublime-text-2 - you can backup some files if you've customized some settings and copy them back once you install the latest Sublime Text 2).

Then, select Preferences > Color scheme > Solarized dark or light.

Of course, if you want you can also manually install the Sublime Text 2 Solarized color schemes: download them from HERE, then place the files under "~/.config/sublime-text-2/Packages/Color Scheme - Default".

Note: Solarized for TextMate (which are used by Sublime Text 2) are currently work in progress.

Scribes Is A Very Interesting, Minimalistic Text Editor With Remote Editing Support

In my quest to find the perfect text editor (for me), I've stumbled upon Scribes and I was quite impressed with its simplicity and features so I though it deserves a post on WebUpd8.

Scribes features:

• Extensible via Python plugins
• Remote editing (ftp, sftp, ssh, samba, webdav, webdavs)
• Snippets! Watch the flash demo.
• Automatic word completion
• Automatic correction and replacement
• Automatic pair character completion and smart insertion
• Automatic indentation
• Powerful text processing and manipulation functions
• Bookmarks and smart navigation
• Document Switcher
• Syntax colors for over 30 languages
• and much more

Unlike most text editors out there, Scribes doesn't have a toolbar or status bar by default. Instead there's a "trigger area" in the top right corner which you can hover to reveal the toolbar. This is also very simplistic and you can only use it to open some files, search, replace, configure Scribes (including selecting between more then 100 themes - these I'm not sure if are included in Scribes or it automatically imports the Gedit styles) and a few other basic operations. There are however some more options available via the right click menu.

The way Scribes handles multiple windows is unique. And a bit weird I should add: it doesn't have tabs and its author describes it as "a spatial and document-centric application". You can switch between your open documents by pressing F9 - this will trigger the document switcher which allows you to focus any open document. I must admit I don't exactly like this feature but I'll try to get used to it.

Scribes also supports remote editing: press Ctrl + L and then type the remote file address (e.g.: ftp://username@ftp.server.com/yoursite/style.css).

Another interesting feature is bookmarks support: press "Ctrl + d" to bookmark a line and then "Ctrl + b" to show the bookmark browser. To remove a bookmark, the same "Ctrl + d" keyboard shortcut is used.

So far I'm really enjoying Scribes and even though I miss the tabs, switching between documents is still easy and I guess this does make sense for a minimalistic text editor.

Besides the tabs, there's another downside which could easily be avoided if there was an option to turn it off (but I for one couldn't figure how to do this): autosave - sometimes I really don't want to save a file and Scribes doesn't seem to agree and it can end up really messing up your files. This is of course not a problem if you use BZR/GIT/SVN but I had to mention it.

(Scribes keyboard shortcuts - just press CTRL + H to trigger this pane)

Install Scribes in Ubuntu

While Scribes is available in the official Ubuntu repositories, the scribes developer says "the version of Scribes currently in Ubuntu is old and broken" so you should use the Scribes PPA instead.

Add the PPA and install Scribes in Ubuntu using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mystilleef/scribes-daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install scribes

Also see:

• Get TextMate Features And Styles In Gedit With GMate
• Sublime Text 2 Is A Nice TextMate Alternative For Linux (As Well As Windows And Mac OSX) | Sublime Text 2 Ubuntu PPA

ReText: Text Editor That Supports Exporting To PDF, ODT, HTML And Google Docs

ReText is a new, simplistic text editor for MarkDown syntax that supports some popular formats such as PDF, ODT, HTML and plain text. Unfortunately you can only export to these file formats (so you can't use it to open a PDF or ODT file but it does work for HTML) but even so, ReText is quite a handy application.

Further more, ReText lets you export your documents to Google Docs. For now, each export creates a new document because "Document replacing API is available in gdata3, which is in Labs for now", says the ReText developer.

Install ReText in Ubuntu

ReText comes with an Ubuntu PPA for easy installation so if you use Ubuntu (10.04 or newer), open a terminal and copy/paste the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mitya57
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install retext

If you're not using Ubuntu, you can grab the ReText source @ Sourceforge.

Thanks to Dmitry for the tip!

Sublime Text 2 Ubuntu PPA

Sublime Text 2 is a pretty neat text editor which will remind you of TextMate. It runs on Linux, Windows and Mac OSX and while it's not free, you can evaluate it for an unlimited period of time. Check out our Sublime Text 2 review for more info.

Sublime Text 2 is currently in alpha and there are new builds available for download quote often so I wanted to create an Ubuntu PPA for a while now but I couldn't find out what license it uses. I've emailed the Sublime Text 2 developer and got no reply so I decided to package it like Adobe Flash: the .deb will download Sublime Text 2 from its website so the .deb doesn't come with the actual files.

While Sublime Text 2 automatically checks for updates and prompts you to download the latest version, I like getting the updates through a PPA. Further more, using this PPA, Sublime Text 2 will get a proper .desktop file so you can right click files to open in Sublime Text 2. You can also open files from the command line (run "sublime-text-2 /path/to/file").

This is the first version of the Sublime Text 2 packaging so there might be bugs. The deb doesn't check if the download was successful; also, it will probably fail to install behind a proxy; and finally: I've only tested it in Ubuntu 10.10 32bit. Use it at your own risk!

Add the PPA and install Sublime Text 2 in Ubuntu

Before installing, please note that initially, Sublime Text 2 used "~/.Sublime Text 2" for the configuration files while the latest versions use "~/.config/sublime-text-2". Because of a bug with having 2 configuration folders, the deb will remove "~/.Sublime Text 2" so if you have some configuration files you want to keep in there, move them to "~/.config/sublime-text-2".

Add our Sublime Text 2 PPA and install it in Ubuntu using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/sublime-text-2
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sublime-text-2

I've set up the PPA for personal use but of course, anyone can use it. If you find any bugs, please report them in the comments below.

For what's new in the latest Sublime Text 2 builds, check out its homepage.


Also see: GMate: Get TextMate Features And Styles In Gedit

TextMap Gedit Plugin Displays A Navigable File Thumbnail In The Side Pane

If you like the minimap which shows you an an overview of your files that comes with Sublime Text 2, you'll be glad to know that such a plugin was released for Gedit.

The plugin is called Text Map and displays a navigable thumbnail of the entire file in the side pane but for now it doesn't display the syntax highlighting as well (like in Sublime Text 2). However, the plugin is currently in beta so it will probably be improved in the future.

To install the plugin, download it, extract the archive and copy the extracted files (files, not folder!) to the ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins folder. Then restart Gedit and activate the plugin from the Gedit Preferences (Edit > Preferences, on the Plugins tab enable the Text Map plugin).

Once activated, you can view a thumbnail of your file by activating the Side Pane (F9 or go to View > Side Pane), then switch to the TextMap tab.

Sublime Text 2 Is A Nice TextMate Alternative For Linux (As Well As Windows And Mac OSX)

Sublime Text 2 is a TextMate-like text editor currently in alpha which is now available for Linux too (as well as Windows and Mac OSX). The application is not free but its evaluation period does not expire.

Sublime Text 2 comes with a very interesting interface: a sidebar for projects or files and Chrome-style tabs as well as multi-pane editing which includes horizontal, vertical and even a quad pane mode:

A very interesting feature is "Goto Anything": press Ctrl+P and type something - this will search in both filenames and lines of code across currently open files as well as recently close files. Start your search by using "#" to go to that word line, "@" for symbol or ":" for line:

The user interface also comes with a cool minimap which shows you an an overview of your files:

Other features include macros, various find tools (find in files, find in open files, incremental find), easily switch between project, multiple selection, autocomplete and lots more. And of course, everything is customizable.

Since Sublime Text 2 is currently in alpha, some features are missing. These include distraction free editing, spell checker, bookmarks, a full python API and more - but all these will be coming in the next months.

Download Sublime Text 2 alpha for Linux, Windows and Mac OSX | To run it on Linux, simply extract the downloaded archive and double click the "sublime_text" file.

Update: Sublime Text 2 is now available in a PPA for Ubuntu!


Want most of the TextMate features in Gedit? Try Gmate.

[Info via Sublime Text 2 blog]

Install Geany And Geany Plugins 0.20 In Ubuntu [PPA]

Geany is a text editor using the GTK2 toolkit with basic features of an integrated development environment. It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages.

Changes in Geany 0.20:

• Improved compatibility with GVFS using GIO to save documents
• Fix sometimes crashing when closing a modified document and choosing Save
• Reorganise Find in Files dialog and add Files pattern to filter search results
• Show mimetype icon in sidebar Documents list and notebook popup menu
• Add per-document indent width setting
• Fix passing quoted arguments when using 'Send Selection to'. This means e.g. sed 's/\./(dot)/g' now works
• Add alternative color scheme based on Python colors (View->Editor->Color Schemes - not all filetypes supported yet).

The Geany Plugins 0.20 package got two new plugins: UpdateChecker and WebHelper as well as many changes for the GeanyExtraSel, eanyGenDoc, GeanyLaTeX and TreeBrowser plugins.

Complete changelog: Geany 0.20 | Geany Plugins 0.20

Install Geany and Geany Plugins 0.20 in Ubuntu

Add the Geany PPA and install Geany in Ubuntu Karmic, Lucid and Maverick using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:geany-dev/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install geany geany-plugins

PHP, CSS And XML Syntax Highlighting In Nano (Linux Text Editor)

A few days ago I was telling you about using syntax highlighting in Nano (Linux command line text editor). Unfortunately Nano doesn't come with syntax highlighting for some of the most used languages such as CSS, PHP and XML by default.

But thanks to Sckyzo, you can have syntax highlighting in Nano for those too. The package which will be downloaded using the command below will download syntax highlighting plugins for: PHP, CSS, XML, xorg.conf and Generic .conf. To install them all, simply paste this in a terminal:

wget http://blog.sckyzo.com/wp-content/nano-supplement.tar
tar -xvf nano-supplement.tar
sudo mv *nanorc /usr/share/nano
sudo rm /usr/share/nano/sourceslist.nanorc

The last command removes sourceslist.nanorc because I got 3 errors when trying to start nano because of it.

And finally, to enable syntax highlighting for these programming languages, open the nanorc file with the following command:

sudo nano /etc/nanorc

And paste this at the end of the file:

## Config Files (.ini)
include "/usr/share/nano/ini.nanorc"

## Xorg.conf
include "/usr/share/nano/xorg.nanorc"

## CSS
include "/usr/share/nano/css.nanorc"

## XML
include "/usr/share/nano/xml.nanorc"

## Generic .conf
include "/usr/share/nano/conf.nanorc"

## PHP
include "/usr/share/nano/php.nanorc"

Once again thanks to Sckyzo!

Bluefish Text Editor 2.0.0 Released [Windows, Linux, Mac OS X]

After 16 development releases and 3 release candidates, Bluefish 2.0.0 is finally ready.

Bluefish is a powerful open source text editor targeted towards programmers and webdesigners, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages, and it focuses on editing dynamic and interactive websites. It runs on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows.

Version 2.0.0 has many parts re-written and many new features. See the changelog for complete details. Also take a look at the features page.


Here is an introduction video for Bluefish 2.0.0:

To install Bluefish 2.0.0 on Ubuntu 8.04 or newer, paste this in a terminal:

sudo wget http://debian.wgdd.de/stuff/debian.wgdd.de_ubuntu.list -N -P /etc/apt/sources.list.d
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install wgdd-archive-keyring
sudo apt-get install bluefish

For other Linux distributions and Windows downloads, see the Wiki page or download the source code.

ViGedit: Use Vim Commands In Gedit [Linux]

ViGedit is a Gedit plugin which allows you to use Vim commands in Gedit.

Here's what you need to do to install it:

bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~tristil/vigedit/main-method
cd main-method
python install.py

Now close any running instance of Gedit, open Gedit and go to Edit > Preferences, on the plugins tab you should see ViGedit.

Download Gedit For Windows

gedit is the official text editor of the GNOME desktop environment (Linux). However, it has been ported to Windows so if you enjoy gedit under Linux, now you can use it in Windows too.

gedit features:

• Full support for internationalized text (UTF-8)
• Configurable syntax highlighting for various languages (C, C++, Java, HTML, XML, Python, Perl and many others)
• Undo/Redo
• Editing files from remote locations
• File reverting
• Print and print preview support
• Clipboard support (cut/copy/paste)
• Search and replace
• Go to specific line
• Auto indentation
• Text wrapping
• Line numbers
• Right margin
• Current line highlighting
• Bracket matching
• Backup files
• Configurable fonts and colors
• A complete online user manual

gedit features also a flexible plugin system which can be used to dynamically add new advanced features to gedit itself.

Download gedit for Windows.