Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

Changing backup character in Textedit and/or Nautilus

Dear Lazyweb…

Hi Alec, this is a cheeky tech-support question about Gnome 2 running under Solaris 9.

I’ve been searching all over Sun.com and gnome.org, as well as the local filesystems to resolve this one, all without success. Google hasn’t yet been prompted to return anything usable either, despite a number of attempts.

The venerable textedit from Solaris marks backup files thusly: foo% whereas Gnome’s Nautilus uses foo~ (as does Emacs).

How do I persuade one or the other to change its behaviour?

Our users require textedit to get their work done because it’s the only editor which can handle the enormous text files involved, sometimes running to well over a giagbyte. They also want to hide the backup files by default to reduce the visual clutter.

I can hack together gruesome kludges of scripts to play silly buggers behind the back of one or the other, but that’s just asking for things to go very badly wrong, possibly involving inadvertent data loss.

Any ideas on how to do it or where to look or whom to ask?

It probably doesn’t help much, but I can’t find out how to change the backup character under much more recent Gnome running on my Linux box.

⊞

Comments

3 responses to “Changing backup character in Textedit and/or Nautilus”

  1. pcl
    re: Changing backup character in Textedit and/or Nautilus

    Well, I’m half-way there.

    I now know precisely which two bytes in /usr/openwin/lib/libxview.so.3 to change from 0x25 0x25 into 0x7E 0x00 to persuade textedit to use ‘~’ as its backup character.

    This “solution” is, at best, a gruesome unsupportable kludge.

    Haven’t yet worked out how to persuade Nautilus to consider ‘%’ as a backup indicator.

    Yes, yes, I know that the src to Nautilus is available and that I can persuade it to do anything I wish. To that claim my response is that building Gnome stuff is distinctly non-trivial on a Solaris box and, further, I’ve no great desire to carry forward my mods to future releases.

    Reply
  2. PAVUK
    re: Changing backup character in Textedit and/or Nautilus

    Hello.

    I am not sure what editor you have set in Nautilus to edit files. I assume it is gedit. In that case run gconf-editor and edit key “/apps/gedit-2/preferences/editor/save/backup_copy_extension”. feel free to change the extension to whatever suites your needs.

    Regards.

    -Marek

    Reply
  3. pcl
    re: Changing backup character in Textedit and/or Nautilus

    Helpful and, indeed, useful under some circumstances. Thanks. However, it answers a slightly different question to what I asked.

    The problem is changing *Nautilus*’s idea of what the backup character happens to be. You told me how to change gedit’s idea.

    I’ve already found out how to perform the corresponding alteration to textedit’s ideas. However, implementing it is a truely awful kludge.

    Paul

    Reply

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