Editplus Running on Linux

EditPlus Running on linux

 

 

• Introduction
• • 3.1 Create a shortcut
  • 3.4 Fixing the keyboard shortcuts

Introduction

Did you realize that your favorite text editor runs on Linux? Well, now you know, so if you've been thinking about making the switch, you're out of excuses.

PS: This means, using DarWine, you can run this fine program on the Mac OS X. How cool is that?

Installation Instructions

To get EditPlus working under Linux, you need to install the popular Wine software. Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix. To install Wine on Ubuntu or Debian GNU/Linux, enter the following at the command line:

apt-get install wine

In a terminal window, download the latest in your home directory.

cd ~
wget ftp://ftp.editplus.com/epp301_en.exe

Then invoke this command to start the installation process:

wine ./epp301_en.exe

Once it's installed, go to where EditPlus was installed, e.g.

cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/EditPlus\ 2/

and run this command:

wine ./editplus.exe

It should start running and you should be good to go.

As an alternative, if you have a full installation of wine on your Linux system, shortcuts are auto-configured for Windows .EXE files. Double-clicking on epp230_en.exe in your desktop file browser will auto-magically bring up wine with the program loaded.

EditPlus running under Wine on Ubuntu

Post-Install Tips

Create a shortcut

Note: Wine should do this automatically if you choose to add an icon to your desktop at the end of the installation.

You can create a desktop shortcut to EditPlus, so that clicking the icon will bring it up in wine.

Instructions for Gnome:

1. Download the EditPlus icon to your desktop
2. Right click on the Desktop and select "Create Launcher..."
3. Set the name to: EditPlus
4. Set the command to: wine "C:\Program Files\EditPlus 2\editplus.exe"
5. Click the "No Icon" button and select the EditPlus icon you downloaded

Fonts

If your Wine apps are using the ugly font that it picks by default, install the Microsoft Tahoma font. It can be downloaded . Then simply run:

wine ./tahoma32.exe

and follow the prompts. Note: installing this font may cause the column marker not display the correct current column. Reason currently unknown.

If you have Debian or a Debian-based distro (such as Ubuntu), you should be able to download and install through "apt-get":

apt-get install msttcorefonts

If you are running Gentoo Linux, you can simply install Windows fonts through a package in portage, called corefonts:

emerge -av corefonts

For other fonts, see .

Windows Theme

The default Windows widgets (buttons, menus, etc) that come with Wine look pretty ugly compared to a nicely polished Gnome interface. Fear not! You can to make it look more Gnome/WinXP-like.

Create a directory for the theme

mkdir -p ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/Resources/themes/royale

Download the Royale theme (or you can download manually from )

wget 
             

Unzip the downloaded file and move into the directory above

unzip Royale_theme.zip; cp Royale\ Theme\ for\ Win\ XP.exe ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/Resources/themes/royale

Install Royale theme and follow the prompts

wine ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/Resources/themes/royale/Royale\ Theme\ for\ Win\ XP.exe

Run winecfg, under the "Desktop Integration" tab, select the "Media Center style" as the Theme

EditPlus running under Wine on Ubuntu with the Royale Theme

Fixing the keyboard shortcuts

You may not have realized it in Windows, but under Linux it can be handy to change some default keybindings (e.g. Ctrl+W to close a tab instead of Ctrl+F4). Use Document > Permanent Settings > Keyboard to do this.

SFTP

This tip not only applies to EditPlus, but ANY *nix app. First, install Fuse. Then install the Fuse filesystem SSHFS . Now you can mount SFTP at a normal mount-point and open/save files just like you would to a local directory.

User tools

If you need to capture the output of your User Tools (Tools->Configure User Tools), you may have problems (at least with wine version 0.9.46). It seems that wine does not redirect well the output of the programs. The only output from the command line that can be redirected to EditPlus are Windows commands like "dir" or "more". A workarround is the following:

• Create a linux shell script with an .exe extension. This shell script must call the aplication you want to execute and write anything interesting in a temporary text file.
• Create a .bat that calls the previous .exe and prints the temporary text file with more.

For example, to capture the output of make you can do the following:

Create a text file named compile.exe with this content

    #!/bin/sh
    make > compileResult.txt

Create a text file named compile.bat with this content

    compile.exe
    more compileResult.txt

use this compile.bat in Tools->Configure User Tools

Known Bugs

• Internet Explorer within EditPlus does not work.
• Tools > Preferences does not seem to work in some versions of Wine, and in fact, may cause it to freeze. If this is the case in your version and you need to edit your preferences, you might try:
  1. upgrading your version of Wine
  2. access the Preferences dialog through Project > Manage Project > Edit Project
  3. hand edit the configuration files located in the installation directory (and have a good laugh at the serious misspellings in some of those files). Installation files are usually located in a path like

     ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/EditPlus 2/

• If you happen to be using Synergy at the same time that you're running EditPlus through Wine, and you copy something on a connected Windows box and bring the mouse focus back to Linux, then move the mouse over an open document in EditPlus, EditPlus will crash. It is probably extremely unlikely that you would happen to be running this specific system setup, so this bug will probably not apply to you. Copying and pasting between EditPlus and native Linux programs on the same machine does not appear to be an issue.
• Ctrl S for Save may switch between two open Wine apps with some wine configurations. To workaround this, you can:
  1. change the Editplus hot key for Save one of two methods:
     1. use the Preferences dialog to change the key binding
     2. edit the Editplus configuration file default.key in the installation directory
  2. change the wine hot key (tutorial coming soon)
• Saving larger files over ftp might result in the ftp dialog hanging at 100% with some configurations. The newer wine releases still give you a chance to push the cancel button which after some time will give you a message "cancelled by user" whereas with earlier version all you could do is terminate Editplus.
• Opening a file may mess up the window drawing under Wine. There are a few ways to correct this (hitting Enter usually works, although this won't work on read-only files if you've set them to be uneditable. The best solution I've found is Alt-D-X (Refresh STX), which redraws the window. You can bind this to a more handy keystroke (e.g. Ctrl-Alt-Z) and just get used to hitting it each time you open a file. There might be a better solution out there...

Linux/BSD Alternatives

If EditPlus under WINE is unacceptable to you, there are Linux/BSD text editors with features comparable to EditPlus.

See

See also

External Links

• Wine Download:
• Darwine Download/Information (OS X)
• Code Weavers (wine developers):