42. Text Editor¶
The Text Editor is for plain text without formatting: notes, shopping lists, a README, the settings files of the system. For letters with fonts and pages, use WritePad (chapter 43).
Start it with the Text & Office slot of the Front Panel, or with amade-pad file.txt.
Working with it¶
- Several files in tabs. Each open file has a tab; a
*in the tab means unsaved changes. Closing a tab or the window asks before throwing changes away. - Line numbers on the left (View → Line Numbers) and word wrap for long lines (View → Word Wrap).
- The status line shows the line and column of the cursor, the encoding, the kind of line ends and the number of characters.
- Find and replace in a window that stays open while you work, with Match case and Wrap around.
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| Ctrl+N / Ctrl+O | New file / open a file |
| Ctrl+S / Ctrl+Shift+S | Save / save as |
| Ctrl+W | Close the tab |
| Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y | Undo / redo |
| Ctrl+F / F3 | Find / find next |
| Ctrl+H | Replace |
| Ctrl+Q | Exit |
Encodings and line ends¶
The Text Editor recognises how a file is stored, UTF-8, UTF-16, Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1, and whether its lines end the Linux way (LF), the Windows way (CRLF) or the old Mac way (CR), and saves it back the same way. A file from a Windows computer stays a Windows file. If you type a character the file's encoding cannot hold, such as € in an ISO-8859-1 file, the editor offers to save the file as UTF-8.
Coming from Windows or macOS
The Text Editor is what Notepad or TextEdit in plain text mode are.
Under the hood
Settings files of the system, under /etc, belong to the administrator. Open them from the Root Console in the Tools drawer, for example with sudoedit /etc/hosts, which opens a copy and puts it back with administrator rights (chapter 50).