gedit: character encoding

[Liza]

I was probably being naive, but I took this seriously:

The purpose of Linux Mint is to produce a modern, elegant and comfortable operating system which is both powerful and easy to use.

This is from the start page of Linux Mint: http://www.linuxmint.com/about.php

I have done some things in my life as a volunteer, but it never came to me when I was criticized about that work to say: "Hey, that's a volunteer work, what do you want from me?"

Either work is done well or not. If not, than it is legitimate to say: Yes, I see that this is not very good, but I'm a volunteer and I just do not have more time for it. So it is going to remain like this. However, in a project with a lot of developers, and with an issue that has been known at least since 2006 (another guy says since 2004), I really think that something is... well... not quite...

[Liza]

@proxima_centauri: thanks! Good night everybody.

[mstombs]

Back to the original point - gedit "the official text editor of the GNOME desktop environment" is particularly useless in this respect. Its had this bug for ever and the maintainers actively rejected a patch that fixed it for a while.

I have a dumb tv box that produces simple text files, which often end-up with a single null character at the end. The problem is not noticed by Windows users, but they cannot be opened in gedit.
Of course mint does come with an editor that works - vi - shows the windows line endings and a ^@ at the end.

Install wine, which has a port of 20-year old(?) Windows notepad and wordpad - they both can open the file, notepad hides/ignores the character, wordpad puts a square box symbol. My preferred editor, on both Windows and linux (running under wine) when not in an ide is notepad++, that tells your the character is gedit is NULL.

Note the problem is deeper than just gedit - meld obviously uses the same file open code, winmerge works fine (on windows and under wine!).

I once tried to open a perfectly valid text file (mysqldump created) with a 5MB line in gedit - never again! After rebooting I was able to make the required change with notepad++

The best thing about Linux is you have plenty of choice, what was wrong with vi - <ESC>:wq

[dagon]

Its had this bug for ever and the maintainers actively rejected a patch that fixed it for a while.

Then maybe the Mate Desktop (gnome2 fork) can adopt it?

[mstombs]

I had a look at mate (and I see so has Clem!), its currently got the same basic version of gedit as LMDE with the same issues - and the patch mentioned refers to a file that no longer exists.

However the issue has been fixed in Gnome3 gedit - it prompts to "edit anyway" and shows the errant characters in red i.e. "\00" which can then be removed.

So I have upgraded the version of just gedit to 3.06 using Debian "sid" (unstable), and it appears to work fine ... in LMDE 64-bit - no need to wait for mate!