(Ted Harding) wrote:
You have a long document, in which are lots of occurrences of numbers which have the Contintental separator system ("." to separate thousands, "," for the decimal point). So, for instance, one million Francs and 25 Centimes is 1.000.000,25
Now run a global edit to convert these into the Real Thing, so that the above example becomes 1,000,000.25 for instance.
I would never end up with an editor for day-to-day tasks that couldn't handle regex search+replace so although I'd have to think about it I could do it relatively quickly with anything I'd use. Or I'd do it 3-stage to avoid thinking ("," to "x" then "." to "," then "x" to ".", depending on the actual data I was working with). If I did this routinely I'd come up with a better solution (I've never actually had to do it yet!)
Of note with UE is it's column edit mode, which (depending on the alignment of the numbers) would allow you to select the column of "," and fill with ".", and vice versa. Probably not the best solution here but column mode is surprisingly useful for quick hacks when the brain isn't engaged fully.
What would be the vim solution to your task?
Key features I look for in an editor are (off the top of my head): - ability to edit files in place across networks (including FTP/SSH) - column mode (I usually have to give up on this one) - ability to handle "any" file (binary files, files with really long line lengths, large files in general) without breaking the file on saving and without taking a long time to load the file to start with. - syntax highlighting and (ideally) code folding (most have this these days) - simple macro support - project support