Macros?

[Fester Bestertester]

I'd dearly love to find a Linux-native (and what better than (K)ubuntu?) text editor (e.g. Dolphin) with the Macro functionality of my old pfe (Programmers File Editor) in Windblows. Yes, I know I can run it in Wine - and I do - but that's a kludge.
Any pointers, or anyone up to the task? I'm no programmer, but frequently need to perform convoluted repetitive tasks, and pfe's macros do this well.

Hopefully ...

[Feathers McGraw]

Can you not do whatever it is you want with shell scripts? If you press F4 in Dolphin it opens a shell in the current directory.

Or did you mean Kate, rather than Dolphin...?

[Fester Bestertester]

You're right, Feathers McGraw, sorry folks. Yes, shell scripting is in the 'programming' world. I use Kate a fair bit, but it lacks macros AFAICT.

[Rog131]

You're right, Feathers McGraw, sorry folks. Yes, shell scripting is in the 'programming' world. I use Kate a fair bit, but it lacks macros AFAICT.

Bug 44908 - kate needs a macro system: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44908

Christoph Cullmann 2015-10-08 09:03:27 UTC
Dear user,

this wish list item is now closed, as it wasn't touched in the last two years and no contributor stepped up to implement it.

The Kate/KTextEditor team is very small and we can just try to keep up with fixing bugs. Therefore wishs that show no activity for two years or more will be closed from now on to keep at least a bit overview about 'current' wishs of the users.

If you want your feature to be implemented, please step up to provide some patch for it. If you think it is really needed, you can reopen your request, but keep in mind, if no new good arguments are made and no people get attracted to help out to implement it, it will expire in two years again.

We have a nice website kate-editor.org that provides all the information needed to contribute, please make use of it. For highlighting improvements our user manual shows how to write syntax definition files.

Greetings
Christoph

[Rod J]

I use a very handy programmers editor called "Geany" mostly when writing bash scripts which I can quickly execute within the editor to test them. Geany is available in the repository.

I was checking out Geany just now to see if it has macro capability ... and it does via a plugin system. It looks a bit fiddly to get the plugin code into Geany (I think you have to download the plugin code that matches the installed version of Geany ... v1.23.1 here in K14.04, probably a later version in K16.04. Then you have to compile the plugin code following the instructions). Anyway, one of the included plugins is called "geanymacro". The following is the README for the plugin, maybe it sounds like what you want?:

"geanymacro is a plugin to provide user defined macros for Geany. It started out
as part of the ConText feature parity plugin, which was split into individual
plugins to better suit Geany's ethos of being as light as possible while
allowing users to select which features they want to add to the core editor.
The idea was taken from a Text Editor for Windows called ConText.

This plugin allows you to record and use your own macros. Macros are sequences
of actions that can then be repeated with a single key combination. So if you
had dozens of lines where you wanted to delete the last 2 characters, you could
simple start recording, press End, Backspace, Backspace, down line and then
stop recording. Then simply trigger the macro and it would automatically edit
the line and move to the next. You could then just repeatedly trigger the macro
to do as many lines as you want.

Select Record Macro from the Tools menu and you will be prompted with a dialog
box. You need to specify a key combination that isn't being used, and a name
for the macro to help you identify it. Then press Record. What you do in the
editor is then recorded until you select Stop Recording Macro from the Tools
menu. Simply pressing the specified key combination will re-run the macro.

To edit the macros you already have, select Edit Macro from the Tools menu. You
can select a macro and delete it, or re-record it. Selecting the edit option
allows you to view all the individual elements that make up the macro. You can
select a diferent command for each element, move them, add new elements, delete
elements, or if it's replace/insert, you can edit the text that replaces the
selected text, or is inserted. You can also click on a macro's name and change
it, or the key combination and re-define that assuming that the new name or key
combination are not already in use.

The only thing to bear in mind is that undo and redo actions are not recorded,
and won't be replayed when the macro is re-run.

You can alter the default behaviour of this plugin by selecting Plugin Manager
under the Tools menu, selecting this plugin, and cliking Preferences.
You can change:

Save Macros when close Geany - If this is selected then Geany will save any
recorded macros and reload them for use the next time you open Geany, if
not they will be lost when Geany is closed.
Ask before replaceing existing Macros - If this is selected then if you try
recording a macro over an existing one it will check before over-writing
it, giving you the option of trying a different name or key trigger
combination, otherwise it will simply erase any existing macros with the
same name, or the same key trigger combination."

This is the home page for Geany: http://www.geany.org/