> a way to search-and-get rid of blank lines in Nano? I played around a bit in Nano and couldn't get anything easy that resembled this behavior (though I was able to do it, the process was convoluted and inconvenient; it would have been easier if Nano supported multi-line regular expressions for search-and-replace). In vi/vim, it's pretty easy: :g/^$/d and likely as easy in the "edbrowse" program that's popular here. However, if you step outside of Nano, you can use sed or grep to do it for you: grep . myfile.txt >outfile.txt sed -i.bak '/^$/d' myfile.txt The sed version will edit myfile.txt in-place and remove all blank lines and save the resulting file (keeping the original as "myfile.txt.bak"...if you don't want a backup file, you can just use "sed -i '/^$/d' myfile.txt" without the backup extension). You can also use the sed version like grep: sed '/^$/d' myfile.txt >outfile.txt to pipe the output to a new file (in this case, "output.txt") There's a TODO for Nano that includes filtering a selected range through an external program, but I don't think that's yet in the production version of Nano. Once that feature hits, you should be able to select a range of lines in your file and then run it through one of the above commands without the file IO parts: grep . sed '/^$/d' This new ability will even allow you to run your text through any of the filters in the "bsdgames" package, such as making your text sound like a pirate, the Sweedish Chef, or turn your text into pig-latin. This just demonstrates the power of being able to have your editor run your text (or a portion there-of) through an external filter program. While the choice of an editor is a personal thing, and I'll admit up-front that I'm a vi/vim junkie, you might want to investigate switching to a more powerful editor that *does* offer the ability pipe sections of your code through an external program. Nano is nice for the beginner but one quickly hits its limitations. > 2nd, I have an editor defined in LYNX, but I understand there's a way to launch > Nano at the current line instead of the beginning of the file. In the man > page, it list a +LINE but I notice no improvement. There's a confounding bit of action going on here. 1) yes, Nano does allow you to use the form "nano +32 file.txt" to jump to line 32 in the file. 2) yes, Lynx does support going to a designated line in a file based on the current line in the "text-edit" control. Unfortunately, Lynx only recognizes certain editors as allowing this offset-format and Nano isn't among those. If you're willing and able to rebuild Lynx from source, it looks like it's an easy fix: in src/LYEdit.c the very first function is called "editor_can_position()" with a static table of editors it knows how to do positioning for (they should all use the "+32" notation for offsetting to line 32). You can just add a line in here for Nano and rebuild. I'm surprised that Debian doesn't already do this for me, as it's got entries for emacs, jed, jmacs, joe, jove, jpico, jstar, pico, rjoe, and vi. It would seem that Nano is at least as popular in Debian as Pico or some of the more obscure editors in that list. I was able to fool Lynx into thinking that Nano was one of these editors by creating a link between Nano and one of the editors that I don't have on my machine ln -s `which nano` jpico and then setting my Lynx editor to "jpico". You'll want to make sure that whatever you link to is accepted by Lynx and doesn't tromp over an existing editor on your system. You can find these by looking through the strings in the Lynx binary: strings -td `which lynx` | grep -5 jpico where "jpico" is one of the items on the list above that isn't emacs or vi (or otherwise you'll get a flood of results). My local install of Lynx is missing jed, joe, and pico from the list above (which came straight from the Lynx code-base). Hope this gives you some leads to try... -tim _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list