The Linux Experience: What's Missing

It's been a week or two since I dedicated my laptop entirely to Whitebox Linux, and so far I have few complaints.

There are some applications that I rely on that are either not available on Linux, or for which I don't have a spare $100,000 for the license. In the former category is UltraEdit. It's one of those applications that seem pretty simple to start with, and then you find one key feature that you can't do without. For me that feature is column-mode editing.

Long-story-short, column-mode editing allows you to select, copy and paste a rectangular block of text. It also allows you to select a single column, start typing, and have whatever you type echoed on every line selected.

So for example if you want to create a view over a table with fifty columns and you want to wrap every column in an expression such as:
Decode(col1,' ','N/A',col1) col1,
...then you;

1. DESC the table
2. paste the result into UltraEdit
3. use column mode to select and copy the rectangle that holds the column names
4. paste the result over to the right, twice

... and this gives you your list of column names three times, looking something like;

col1 col1 col1
col2 col2 col2
col3 col2 col3

You then use column mode to select the gap to the left of the leftmost column of column names (nothing confusing about this example!) and type "Decode(". This gives you:

Decode(col1 col1 col1
Decode(col2 col2 col2
Decode(col3 col3 col3

Then you select the gap to the left of the second column of column names, and type ",' ','N/A'," giving you:

Decode(col1,' ','N/A',col1 col1
Decode(col2,' ','N/A',col2 col2
Decode(col3,' ','N/A',col3 col3

Well, you see how this works anyway. Once you get into the swing of things this is very fast and pretty soon you have:

Decode(col1,' ','N/A',col1) col1,
Decode(col2,' ','N/A',col2) col2,
Decode(col3,' ','N/A',col3) col3,

Now you could do the same thing by querying user_tab_columns, but with a complex or lengthy expression I much prefer this way. For example in:

Decode(LTrim(col1,'0'),'}',0,'A',1,'B',2,zoned_to_number(col1)) col1,

... I just can't keep track of all of those single quotes that have to be doubled-up.

It also will search and replace on special characters such as carriage returns very easily, so you can remove occurances of blank lines by replacing "^p^p" with "^p" until they're all gone for example, or get a line break after each comma by replacing commas with ",^p".

Not ... available ... on ... Linux.

Ouch.

Still, if you're on Windows then I recommend it. For $40 I'd give a copy to every DBA and developer (only if they're on Windows, of course. It'd be a bit of a waste otherwise.)