psss / edd

Always use your favorite text editor, anywhere.

Edd

Always use your favorite text editor, anywhere.

Motivation

I'm completely addicted to using Vim for editing text. Any time Vim is not around I feel so slow, so inefficient, so cumbersome. Thus I created Edd who enables me to use Vim literally anywhere.

Summary

Edd is a tiny script which allows to easily edit content of the clipboard with a single keyboard shortcut. In this way Edd enables you to always use your favorite text editor, wherever you need. The name edd is the abbreviation of EDit clipboarD.

Usage

Simple and straightforward:

select, edd, paste

Use Ctrl-V shortcut to paste the updated text. Some applications support the Ctrl-Shift-V keyboard shortcut for pasting clipboard content as plain text. Try this one if the formatting is broken.

Options

Available command line options are:

--last	open last edited text
--list	select text from history list
--shortcut	set up Alt-Shift-E keyboard shortcut

Note: Shortcut creation works with Gnome 2 and Gnome 3.

Config

Edd uses the following environment variables:

EDITOR

set to the text editor of your choice

EDD_CONFIG

path to the config file (default: ~/.edd)

EDD_COMMAND

command to be executed by the keyboard shortcut

The default command is:

gnome-terminal --command edd

Use environment variable or config file to customize it:

EDD_COMMAND="gnome-terminal --geometry 111x44 --command edd"

Note: Run edd --shortcut to update the command afterwards.

Install

The easiest way is to install the latest packages from copr:

dnf copr enable psss/edd
dnf install edd

However, edd does not depend on rpm packaging. It should run fine on any Linux distribution. Just make sure xclip is installed on your box, clone the repo and use happily :-)

Links

Git: https://github.com/psss/edd

Docs: http://edd.readthedocs.org/

Issues: https://github.com/psss/edd/issues

Releases: https://github.com/psss/edd/releases

Copr: http://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/psss/edd/

Authors

Petr Šplíchal, Branislav Blaškovič, Ryan Brown and Eva Mráková.

edd's Issues

Keeps trailing newline on one-line pastes

When I copy multiple lines of text then edit down to one line, edd doesn't remove the trailing newline. This is a pain if that one line is only a part of some terminal input.

Would you accept a patch that strips trailing newlines, or even all trailing whitespace?

Which operating systems is this for?

I suggest to add a REQUIREMENTS section to the README.rst.

From the .rpm releases I guess it is probably Linux & Unix-like systems - which do you test with?

Thanks!

What about a new option --last?

When something goes wrong (browser/system freeze) it's useful to
check saved version of the text and continue with work. This can
be easily done using:

ls -lt /tmp/edd* | head
vim ls -t /tmp/edd\* | head -1

But we could make it even more easier by implementing a new option
--last which would detect the latest edited text automagically.

Add --list option to list all available edd-files

As I mentioned in #1, it would be nice to have --list option which would list all available /tmp/edd* files and user could choose from them.

For list we can use zenity or dmenu. I prefer dmenu but it would take another dependency.

Use primary selection

If the primary selection is used instead of the clipboard, ctrl-c
would not be necessary and we would save one key stroke ;-)

Cancel in --last opens dir

On 'edd --list', if one presses 'cancel' the directory is opened in EDITOR.
IMO edd should exit instead.