I used to use a Window$ system-tray applet all the time, for reformatting quoted email. I could copy the quoted text to the clipboard, click the applet's icon, and it (a) removed the ">" quote characters and (b) reformatted it (preserving the paragraph breaks).

Is there an applet like this for Linux? If not, is there a way to do the same thing from a script? (Preferably this would work directly with the clipboard, rather than having to save the text as a file each time.) Thanks!

I don't know of any which are purpose-made made for this, but:

if you have OpenOffice or similat, you could just use the edit/replace text function.

otherwise, you could use vi in a terminal window key-clicks below)
- open a term window
- vi blahblah
- i
- paste text into window
- esc
- :1,$s/>//g

the result won't have any of your >'s ... you can just re-copy&paste it.

Note this is just a simple example... you can build on it to accomplish what you're after..

cheers

Thanks for your reply. Yes, I know how to use search/replace in a text editor... That's not really the problem.

I would like to remove > marks and reformat all paragraphs (join all lines not separated by a blank line) in one operation.

In particular, Yahoo Mail breaks up text like this:

> This is an example of the kind of
> text you see in
> quoted Yahoo Mail messages.
>
> I have no idea why it quotes this way, but I think
> you'll agree, it's pretty dumb.

With the applet I described, I would just:

1. Select & copy the text.
2. Click the applet's system-tray icon.
3. Paste the fixed text, which looked like this (without the hyphens):

- - -

This is an example of the kind of text you see in quoted Yahoo Mail messages.

I have no idea why it quotes this way, but I think you'll agree, it's pretty dumb.

- - -

Then I'd add the writer's initials to each paragraph, e.g.:

JS> This is an example of the kind of text you see in quoted Yahoo Mail messages.

Nice, eh?

I just tried this same process in KDE's Kate text editor. It took over 20 keystrokes (without adding the initials).

I did use Kate's Ctrl+J command to reformat each paragraph---but unfortunately it removes blank lines instead of preserving them. Too bad there isn't a choice about that.

Anyway, thanks for listening. (And if someone involved in one KDE's text-editor projects wants to consider adding this kind of feature, that'd be great!)