I am wondering if it's possible for gedit to display multiple panes in the same file. For example, I have a txt file about songwriting. I want the left-most pane to contain only info about specific ideas, the middle pane to have only concepts, and the right-most pane only heuristics for finding song topics.

If not possible, can you suggest another software?

Thanks in advance!

Matt

Hi there,

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Do you want to open the same text file two or three times, so that you can edit multiple sections of that file at the same time? Then the answer is no, gedit can't do that. You might be able to start two instances of gedit and open the same file in both of them, but since gedit always assumes it is exclusively working on a file, the two instances would fight each other each time you switch between the two windows.

The same is true for Bluefish, I just tried.

I'm afraid no. But then again, maybe I misunderstood you altogether.

[X] Doc CPU

You can always try Emacs:

http://www.fnal.gov/docs/products/em.../emacs_20.html

I meant having a single txt file which has vertical divisions for categories, not horizontal divisions.

As I said - Emacs.

How a window displays a buffer is independent of the data in that buffer. They can be horizontal, vertical, or both...

Wow, emacs seems very cool. Thanks for suggesting it. I found out how to split a window horizontally (C-x 3) but when I enter text into one pane, it shows up in the other pane. I would like to have a single text file with multiple independent panes. Could you explain how to do this, jpollard?

Hi there,

yes, of course, that's because they're just two displays of the same data.

That's not possible. You seem to have a misconception of text files: They're just linear streams of characters (including line breaks). There is no such thing as multiple independent sections in one text file. Think of them as a long roll of paper with text on it, and two or more cameras capturing a portion of it. If the two cameras happen to be pointed at the same spot, they both see the same, and they both see at the same time what someone is writing in their field of view.

[X] Doc CPU

That leaves me where I started, then. So I am hoping that somebody could point me toward something I could use to achieve my original purpose. I know a full-fledged word processor like LibreOffice's Writer could do this, but it's slow.

It would also corrupt your output.

There is no difference between an office file and any other regular file. They are just streams of bytes.

Hi there,

can it actually? I don't see how. Not on a regular text file, anyway.

So let's look at the issue from a different angle. What you want is definitely NOT a simple text file, because there's no way of structuring it persistently. You can arrange text in a file to some extent, but there's nothing that would make text stay within a box. All so-called layout would have to be based on just the right number of spaces and blank lines. A very fragile thing. Add a few words somewhere, and the whole layout collapses again.

LibreOffice Calc (or MS Excel, for that matter) has an appealing way of combining multiple spreadsheets in one document. If these were just text sheets, would that be what you wish for? Actually, I've been wondering for more than ten years why Excel can't include a simple text sheet in place of a table. It would be real smart. Neither can LibreOffice Calc (unlike Excel, Calc can't even save a chart as a tab of its own, it can only superimpose it on a table sheet).

With Writer, however, you could create a two- or three-column table on the page, adjust the columns as you wish (and disable automatic resizing!), and start typing in one of them. The table will grow downward with more text being typed, but the text will stay within the confines of its column. Is that what you imagine? - However, you can't save that as a plain text file, as it would not retain the structure; instead, you'll have to save it as a real Office file (*.doc or *.docx).

So that's about how I see things. Now it's your turn again. ;-)

[X] Doc CPU

The reason I was gunning for txt was because applications like gedit are very quick to open on my hardware. Libre Writer is rather slow. In fact, the file type does not matter to me.

Can you suggest something with the same capability in question but on a quicker program?

Just use separate files...

The difference with writer is that you aren't editing the file.... you are editing a workfile that doesn't have the same form as the text file. When writer exits/saves it has to copy the workfile and it has to rearrange things to be put in the output.

Of course, because writer has to first convert the source file into the workfile it tends to be slower. It has a hell of a lot more work to do.