I'm looking for a gratis text editor for Linux that supports column manipulations/selection like the Notepad++ text editor for Windows allows.
Specifically, I want to be able to:
The application must be a full GUI text editor, not a CLI line editor or text processor.
Geany is based on Scintilla like Notepad++.
By holding down the Control and Shift keys.
Column mode editing (rectangular selections)
There is basic support for column mode editing. To use it, create a rectangular selection by holding down the Control and Shift keys (or Alt and Shift on Windows) while selecting some text. Once a rectangular selection exists you can start editing the text within this selection and the modifications will be done for every line in the selection.
It is also possible to create a zero-column selection - this is useful to insert text on multiple lines. Source : https://www.geany.org/manual/current/index.html#column-mode-editing-rectangular-selections
There are packages for many distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, etc.). You can also install from source : https://www.geany.org/download/releases/
Geany is cross-platform and is available for Linux, macOS, and Windows. The Windows port is the only version that is missing some features.
Vim does rectangular selection out of the box. GUI vim is available in repositories of many distros (e.g. gvim in Ubuntu and Arch).
In vim language, this operation is called 'visual block selection' and is started by pressing Ctrl-V, then the block can be selected by cursor motions.
To go beyond EOL, one has to explicitly :set virtualedit=block.
When the selection is done, x or d deletes. It is possible to replace the selection with whitespace by r (r and then Space).
Text can be appended after visual selection by hitting A (or prepended before it by I).
y, put (paste) p, and put before cursor P. And don't forget that x and d don't only delete text, but also put it into the default yank register (it's more similar to the cut action in most other GUI editors than to delete).
Emacs, of course. The concept is called rectangles and works cursor-based, similar to normal marks (you never required mouse involvement!).
So the idea is that you mark a region as usual (C-SPC and then move the cursor). Through that, you define a rectangle between the current point and the mark. On that rectangle you can operate with several rectangle commands, all prefixed with C-x r:
C-x r k kills the rectangle. You can yank it with C-x r y.C-x r t replaces the contents of the rectangle with a string.Additionally to using normal marks to select a rectangle region, you can use M-x rectangle-mark-mode for direct selection, by default bound to C-x SPC. With this, you can also easily select rectangles where the mark would have to go behind the ends of lines.
In addition, there is the multiple-cursors package, which, in a way, generalizes the concept of rectangles -- you can edit at multiple places at once.
edlin. Of course, Emacs is far superior, but I guess Uncle Bill didn't know about it or something, so we were stuck with edlin.
Commented
Feb 22, 2023 at 16:03
CudaText is a free and open source GUI text editor, in the same vein of SublimeText that runs on Linux, macOS, *BSD, Solaris, and Windows.
It has column selections you can access by pressing Alt key plus dragging over text. It can edit with multiple carets and do insertions or deletions at any point in multiple lines.
Alt key. Under Linux they might be using a different key combination to avoid potential conflict with some window managers that use Alt drag to move OS windows, I think
Commented
Feb 23, 2023 at 22:13
You can use this Snap to install Notepad++.
There is also open source reimplementation of Notepad++ called Notepad Next
At the risk of stating the obvious, Notepad++ is an option. Though it doesn't seem to be an officially supported platform, Notepad++ is widely used on Wine, and issues that prevent it from working get fixed, as far as I can tell.
jEdit is cross-platform; that's why I started to use it. It's released under GPL 2.0.
"Rectangle select" mode can be found on the Edit menu, or with <alt>+\
As with other editors listed in other answers, making a rectangular selection, even of zero width, then typing, inserts the typed text on every line in the selection.
Sublime Text is a cross-platform good text editor with lots of functionalities as well, including column selection and edit.
I've used it in both Windows and Fedora quite fine. Although it has "non-obligatory" (winzip-like) paid license for continuous use, it's free for evaluating.
In Kate toggle Ctrl + Shift + B
To go back to the default selection mode you have to press Ctrl + Shift + B again.
I'll also say UltraEdit, but it's commercial.
NEdit (and nedit-nc) can do this. It has been my primary Unix/Linux editor since back in the SunOS/HPUX days. It has been around for a very long time (EDIT: since 1992 according to Wikipedia) , it is available in all package managers as far as I know. Hold ctrl while dragging the mouse cursor to select a block CTRL-C to copy the block CTRL-R to find/replace within the block CTRL-V to paste the block as text (not column) so it will be inserted at the cursor CTRL-SHIFT-V to paste as a block. You can paste any text as a block, also text that was selected in the normal way. Short lines are automatically padded with spaces to make the output a block.
You can type within the block although it is not as advanced as Kate.
There is one I used to use called Notepadqq, it is free/opensource. It is designed to look exactly like Notepad++. I don't know features wise, but it is pretty good.
