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Re: How to set Gedit left margin to 80 characters



On Monday 27 January 2020 19:16:35 Default User wrote:

> Okay, I'm stumped.
>
> I'm running 64-bit Debian unstable, Cinnamon desktop environment.
>
> All I want to do is set the Gedit left margin to 80 characters, so
> that text hard-wraps (or at least soft-wraps) at that point.
>
> Currently, with the word-wrap setting in Gedit selected, and a visual
> representation of a margin showing at column 80, text will sail right
> on by the bogus margin at 80 characters, not wrapping until it reaches
> the left edge of the display.
>
> After doing some research, it seems that it may not even be possible
> in Gedit to set a real, functional left margin to 80 characters.
>
> What?
>
> Well, can it be done?
> And if not, (rhetorical question) why not?

Because you are working under the false impression that gedit is an 
editor?  It is not...  Its much better at playing 32 pickup when asked 
to save  your work. I gave up on gedit 4 or 5 years ago when it played 
52 pickup on a 1000 line of hal code file for the 6th time in a couple 
months. That meant I had to restart configureing a cnc milling machine 
yet again almost from scratch.  But this time I was convinced I should 
first find and install an editor worthy of being called an editor. I 
hate reinventing wheels.

I even tried emacs, but its controls were so different I'd have to learn 
it from scratch. 5 or so editors including vim that I used to love 
decades back, but rediscovered again why I quit using it several times, 
until later I found geany, and many of the gedits functions were 
duplicated in geany's hot keys, so I used it to reconstruct the 
destroyed .hal file by copy/pasting stuff back to where it actually 
went.

4 or 5 years later geany is still my default text editor and has not yet 
scrambled a single file for me, ever.

So do yourself a favor and use a real editor. geany may not be your cup 
of tea, but anyone who calls gedit an editor is mistaken. It will burn 
you, worse yet, burn up many hours of your time, because it will 
scramble your prose.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
 - Louis D. Brandeis
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>


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