Topic by livrobo 2015-05-19 12:19:44

  • Registered: 2012-03-27
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Hi guys.

  I've been messing around with Debian 8 recently. I'm still quite new to Linux, so I'm just learning as I go along. I have a question that I was hoping maybe someone here could help me with.

  I've been using PuTTY to access the terminal from Windows which is working fine. The problem arises whenever I need to edit a configuration file. I open the file I need to edit using Nano, but I can't figure out how I would go about navigating to the line I need to change. I'm not sure if I'm just doing something wrong, if this can't be done using PuTTY, or what the problem is. Does anyone have any ideas?

  Thanks.

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Reply by dhruv 2015-05-19 13:30:40

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up-and-down arrow navigation works fine here. Are there any specific problems you're having? lag is one for me, but there are some workarounds, but I need to know if it's lag or something else.

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Reply by GrannyCheeseWheel 2015-05-19 14:20:34

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There is one thing I have noticed with puTTY, NVDA doesn't always report the position accurately inside there, so be careful and make doubly sure you're changing what you want to change. You should just be able to arrow through it like anything else.

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Reply by Ethin 2015-05-21 22:43:57

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This is why you never, ever edit something over SSH. Editing things is a serious pain, because unlike the Nano text editor on a Debian system that runs on the physical hardware or your physical and present machine, Nano doesn't work as well.

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!]: 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out ?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."    — Charles Babbage.
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Reply by livrobo 2015-05-22 01:58:45

  • Registered: 2012-03-27
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Hello.

  Thanks a lot for your responses guys. For some reason, the arrow keys don't navigate through the text, so I've just decided to download the files to my local machine, edit them, and re-upload. It's not the best method I'm sure, but it's working for now.

If a helicopter falls in the field and no one's around, it doesn't make a sound.

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Reply by Ethin 2015-05-22 04:10:23

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Hi,
It's the best and most secure and accessible method I know of at the moment, because editing files over SSH can be very difficult, and if you don't know what your changing in the file your editing, you could screw something up very badly.

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!]: 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out ?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."    — Charles Babbage.
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Reply by dhruv 2015-05-22 07:17:23

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There's a real hacky thing if you're using it with nvda. You can check what line you're on with the object review thing. Press down arrow, then use the numpad if you're on the desktop keyboard. I don't know about the laptop commands, so can't help you there. UNlike up/down rrows, the object review gives you correct information.

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Reply by Zersiax 2015-05-22 11:52:45

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I guess you could try Cygwin, that might work better with NVDA. PuTTY has these issues and there is an alternative called Teraterm, which works but has other issues. I tend to either just ssh in from linux itself, or just hook up a braile display to the machine if I have physical access to it, like a VM, and just work with speech and braille in the VM itself. It really depends on what I am doing at that particular moment.
The notion of never, ever, editing config files over SSH is frankly quite ridiculous, there will be loads of times you might be required to do that, for all sorts of reasons. Editing config files on Windows is asking for trouble unles you make sure you use an editor that actually doesn't mess with the formatting and doesn't insert windows-style line endings, that might screw up some applications...
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Reply by Ethin 2015-05-22 20:29:17

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@balliol, remember that once you ransfer it back to the Linux box, you could always use dos2unix to translate the line endings back into unix LF line endings.

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!]: 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out ?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."    — Charles Babbage.
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Reply by the_ruler_of_dark_forces 2015-05-23 01:27:15

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As I edit the config files quite often, copying the files back and forth is quite time consuming to me. Nano and teraterm work quite fine to me and when I'm not sure, which line I am on, I use nvda say current line command, on laptop it is nvda+l.
It also helps when you press the arrow keys slowly.

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Reply by queenslight 2015-05-23 02:57:02

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It may be even easier using the "E-Shell" program using Emacs and Emacspeak, but I'm still learning.

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Reply by Victorious 2015-05-23 08:40:06

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I've had great success with secure crt in combination with the jaws scripts at
http://chrisnestrud.com/projects/jfw/scrt

Its unfortunate that secure crt itself is pretty expensive, and that all of the free ssh clients out there i've tried all don't work well for editing config files.

I've used secure crt with jaws for about a year now at university for introductory courses in programming, which was done with the vim editor.

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Reply by kyle12 2015-05-23 12:39:43

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Hi,
As for editing over SSH, I actually find I can use terraterm, PuTTY, or even winssh.
As for emacspeak, I can't for the lie of me get it to work, so I can't say about E-Shell.

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Reply by queenslight 2015-05-23 13:24:54

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Hi there,

Please feel free to have a look over here , and see if any of the links in there help.

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Reply by neo_anderson 2015-05-24 10:28:39

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winsftp
google winsftp
it's decent for windows
works well with nvda
i've been able to copy files back and forth
edit on the fly
even compile makefiles using it.
good luck
works with windows
xp
vista
7
8
and 8.1/2
last time i checked.
works witn nvda and jaws
good luck.
later neo.

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Reply by frastlin 2015-05-30 10:18:20

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I just use filezilla for most things. Only for installing and updating do I use SSH.
I should check out winsftp though.

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Reply by serrebi 2015-06-08 17:02:01

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I do all my editing using filezilla sftp(Essentially, ssh connection via ftp): I use wordpad, or notepad++ , to edit the files locally through the edit feature of filezilla. Works great. I then switch back to puTTY.

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