Bug 183560

Version:           2.0.4svn (using 3.5.10, Debian Package 4:3.5.10.dfsg.1-0lenny1 (lenny/sid))
Compiler:          Target: i486-linux-gnu
OS:                Linux (i686) release 2.6.26-1-686

Taken from: https://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1942464&forum_id=292014

About one year ago, I started this thread on piping text with Kile, and submitted a patch to address this missing feature. 
 
All I wanted was to automatically reformat a paragraph: 
* inserting linebreaks in lines with more than 79 characters, 
* joining lines with less than 79 characters, but part of the same paragraph 
 
The UNIX commands that easily does it is fmt. Just pipe a text through it. 
 
Similar and very useful funcions are so simple to do invoke in vim, Emacs, even Kate! 
 
vim: select a paragraph, and press {g}+{q}. Or run :%! fmt 
Kate: enable the Kate TextFilter plugin, select a paragraph, press {ctrl}+{\}, and filter the text through fmt. 
Emacs: {meta}+{q} 
 
However, this is not possible to do in Kile. 
 
It's very tiresome to reformat paragraphs manually (BTW, does Kile sort text?). 
 
 
The patch I submitted just helps the user to filter a piece of text through fmt, sort, Perl scripts, etc, 
thus reformating paragraphs just like in Kate, vim and Emacs. 
 
To tell the truth, it has always been possible to emulate text piping in Kile, using the official Kile/DCOP interface. 
It is a bit tricky, but it is possible anyway. 
 
However, when *more than one tab are open* in Kile, things get very complicated. 
 
The reason is that is hard to guess, from within the DCOP interface, 
*which open tab is the active document*. That's why my unharmful patch is needed. It makes available an internal 
variable to the DCOP interface that denotes which tab is the active one. Using this variable, it is a matter of course 
to insert whatever you want, and wherever you want into the active document. 
 
The patch was not added to the official Kile, because it relies on the DCOP interface, instead of D-BUS. 
But the DCOP interface is still present in the official Kile 2.0.3, and this version still ships with a kile_remote_control.txt 
file, a simple manual that teaches the user how to use the very Kile/DCOP interface. 
 
So why wasn't the patch incorporated? I think developers just forgot to. 
 
In account of this one single tiny missing feature, I was forced to give up Kile, and vim has since then made lazy about finding a solution. 
 
It would be OK, were not the fact that at least one Kile user emails me *every month* asking whether I came up with a better solution. 
 
I am always sorry to say no, and I send my patch to them, and a script to automate the pipe line. 
 
It seems that this has been a required feature since 2004. See 
 
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88796 
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=89568 
https://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1824819&forum_id=292014 
 
In sum, the reason I'm posting this message is to let users know that, in account of such demands, I rewrote the patch 
and wrote a Bash script to automate piping in Kile, even though I am no longer a Kile user, much less a Kile developer. 
The patch is much simpler now, and the accompanying script much better. 
 
The patch against 2.0.3, the kilepipe script, and an already patched Kile Debian package are found in the ``hacks'' section of my homepage. 
 
http://phi.pro.br/hacks 
 
Usage examples: 
 
* Select a piece of text and run 
 
$ kilepipe perl myscript.pl 
 
$ kilepipe fmt 
 
$ kilepipe sort 
 
* And the selected text is replaced with the output from perl, fmt, sort, etc. 
 
The DCOP interface is slow, and the KTextEditor/DCOP interface is inconsistent sometimes. 
I will not maintain, and develop the script and the patch. There are bugs, but I hope another user may voluntarily accept the task. 
 
So use this tool with care, and continue to ask developers for these features: 
 
1) We want to pipe to stdout and to read from stdin 
2) We want to automatically reformat paragraphs