Do Know Evil – Tyler Mulligan’s Tips and Tricks

I was browsing around linuxappfinder.com today and came across Geany, which I’ve already gotten quite comfortable with.

Some features I found that make it similar to notepad++

- The hotkeys are very similar if not identical to notepad++ (gedit has different ones)
- It supports regex find/replace
- It supports ‘find in files’ – by using grep
- It’s a lightweight and efficient IDE

Some features Geany has that notepad++ doesn’t

- Status window with a history
- Scribble pad
- Built in terminal
- Color picker
- Support for projects
- Tight integration with my window manager
- The functions menu is expanded to contain all sorts of clever information that I can fold in a non buggy tree

Some features notepad++ has that geany doesn’t

- TextFX (neat macros that help you with string related pattern updates)
- GUI for changing theme colors
- Tabbed find/replace and find in all (nit pick)

Why I’m quickly choosing Geany over Notepad++

With tight integration with gnome (as opposed to notepad++ which I have to run through wine) and a package of dark themes which I was able to find quickly through the Geany’s FAQ.

I haven’t tried it on Windows yet but I’d imagine it’d run pretty well.. though you are missing out on a lot of things you can take advantage of in linux. If you’re a windows user and would like to give it a whirl, this will help you.

For those of you familiar with regular expressions, you’re going to love this little feature in Notepad++, Regex find and replace. If you haven’t used it yet, you’ve been wasting your time doing things the hard way.

Lets say I have a text file with a List of websites in the format as such: URL, Description, Name and I want to turn this list into a bunch of links.

I would look for the following string:

(http://[a-z.]+), ([A-z ']+), ([A-z ]+)

By using parenthesis, I’m defining variables I’d like to call back in my replace string. I have created three, the URL(\1), the Descriptiption(\2) and the Name(\3). Then I call them in my replace string and rearrange them as such:

<a href="\1">\3</a>: \2

Now I just click replace, and like magic they are all transformed into pastable links:

Do Know Evil: Tyler Mulligan’s Blog
detrition: Tyler Mulligan’s Portfolio
Google: Tyler’s Search Engine of Choice

But the fun doesn’t stop there, no no no. Say I had multiple files with the same structure, I would just open said files and click, “Replace in all open documents”.

So there you have your crash course in regex find and replace compliments of Notepad++. It’s it bit limited in some respects, it doesn’t fully support regular expressions but it certainly makes a difference. You can read the details about it’s abilities here.