QWriter is a simple source code editor that can be used in MS Windows and GNU/Linux. The UI is written using the Qt toolkit and it uses “Scintilla” as the back-end for source code editing and supports various computer languages.
Unlike with many other similar tools, QWriter may not have a huge amount of features, but it’s a pretty decent open source utility but most importantly, it’s portable (works out of the box in Windows but the portability in GNU/Linux can be a bit troublesome though, more below).
Also due to its simple nature, it can be a pretty user friendly text editor too, especially for the MS Windows platform as GNU/Linux and its desktops have some pretty powerful text editors.
Some of the main features …
*. Supports syntax highlighting for a lot of programming languages such as: Java, C#, C++, CSS, PHP, Java Script, Perl, Python, XML, HTML, Ruby etc.
*. Tabbed interface.
*. Search, search and replace, go to line, undo/redo, zoom in/out, bookmark etc.
*. A tool-bar at the top and a status bar at the bottom (shows line numbers, column etc).
*. The “Settings” windows lets you change settings such as: Change tab position, disable word-wrap, enable/disabling highlighting current row/line, remove right margin and disable displaying line numbers etc.
*. Change character encoding.
Well, that’s pretty much QWriter right there ;-).
As said, it’s a portable (in both GNU/Linux and MS Windows) utility. So if you wanna try it, then get it from this QWrite home page.
If you’re a MS Windows user, then please download the package called “qwriter-0.1.9-win.zip (binary)” and for Ubuntu users (I tested it with 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot) please get the package called “qwriter-0.1.9-lin.tar.gz (binary)”.
Simply extract the content, and in Windows, just double click on the file called “qwriter.exe” and it should open it.
In Ubuntu …
However, installation in Ubuntu is a bit hectic as you have to manually copy a required library called “libqscintilla2.so…” to the “/usr/lib” directory, otherwise it won’t work. For that please follow the below steps.
1. After the download completes, extract the content to your “Home” folder.
2. Then open your Terminal window and enter the below command. Please replace “gayan” with your user name.
sudo chmod a+r /home/gayan/qwriter-0.1.9-lin/libqscintilla2.so.5.2.0
3. Now enter the below command to copy this file to “/usr/lib” directory and it’ll be automatically renamed to “libqscintilla2.so.5”.
Again, you’ll have to replace “gayan” with your user name.
sudo cp /home/gayan/qwriter-0.1.9-lin/libqscintilla2.so.5.2.0 /usr/lib/libqscintilla2.so.5
That’s it.
Now simply double click on the fie called “qwriter” in the extracted folder, and it should open “QWriter” in Ubuntu or any other GNU/Linux distribution (hopefully:D).
Good luck.
