When installing the TextWrangler in OSX you also get an edit command which allows you to open any text file from the command line.

Is it possible to have a similar functionality in Ubuntu to type some command on the terminal to open a file in a specific text editor (say Kate)?

6 Answers

You can open (Up to my knowledge) any of the editors like this:

NAME_OF_EDITOR FILENAME

gedit filename (Ubuntu)
kate filename (Kubuntu)
bluefish filename
kwrite filename
libreoffice filename

You can even open a web page the same way
firefox filename.html
chrome filename.html
banshee filename.ogg or .mp3

You can see the tendency here..

3

To open a file using kate, you can run something like:

kate filename

This might show some messages like:

kate(3702)/kdecore (services) KMimeTypeFactory::parseMagic: Now parsing "/usr/share/mime/magic"
kate(3702)/kdecore (services) KMimeTypeFactory::parseMagic: Now parsing "/home/user/.local/share/mime/magic"
Bus::open: Can not get ibus-daemon's address.
IBusInputContext::createInputContext: no connection to ibus-daemon

To remove these messages, redirect the error output stream to /dev/null:

kate filename 2>/dev/null

If you want to continue using the same terminal, add an & after the command:

kate filename 2>/dev/null &

---

If you want to run edit filename to open it, you could create a bash function in your ~/.bashrc file. Add the next code to your ~/.bashrc file:

edit() { kate "$@" 2>/dev/null & }

3

If you prefer to use the command edit in Ubuntu also because you are used to do so you could also define an alias for your favourite editor like for Kate:

alias edit='kate'

To make this alias permant just add this line to ~/.bash_aliases.

If you don't have any graphics environment and you are running on console you can always use:

vim foo.txt
nano bar.txt
pico foo.html
emacs bar.xml
...

and so on falls back to the first answer..

1

You can use CLI command for the desired editor to open and edit files.For example gedit in gnome or kate in KDE.

Just type:

kate filename

to open file in kate.

I sometimes use a classical terminal where mcedit is my prefered editor, and often like to pass a line number, to correct a program/script.

To uniformely call them edit source.sh 123 I wrote this script, which I placed as 'edit' in the path:

#!/bin/bash
# - edit a file using mcedit or gedit, depending on X11 or console invoking.
# - jump to specified line, if any.
Xedit=/usr/bin/gedit
if [[ $TERM = "linux" ]]; then if [ $# -eq 1 ]; then mcedit $1 else if [ $# -eq 2 ]; then
# echo "edit invoked\t/usr/bin/mcedit +$2 $1" >> /tmp/edit.log /usr/bin/mcedit +$2 $1 else if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then /usr/bin/mcedit fi fi fi else if [[ $TERM = "xterm" ]]; then # scheint nicht zu helfen # LANGUAGE=C export LC_ALL=C if [ $# -eq 1 ]; then $Xedit $1 else if [ $# -eq 2 ]; then
# echo "edit invoked\t/usr/bin/scite -open:$1 -goto:$2" >> /tmp/edit.log # $Xedit -open:$1 -goto:$2 $Xedit +$2 $1 else if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then $Xedit fi fi fi fi
fi

Use see old debug instructions from when I used scite, not gedit, as graphical editor.

Something, which doesn't work this way, is opening of multiple files like this:

 edit *.html

if there is more than one html-File, so the pattern gets expanded to multiple files.

Valid invocations are:

 edit edit foofile edit foofile 123

from X or terminal.

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