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Gedit plugins: Extension and customization guide

August 7th, 2009 | Comments | Posted in Featured, How-to, Linux, Ubuntu

gedit5Sometime back one of my friend tweeted saying he could install notepad++ using wine on Ubuntu. We had a good discussion on why he doesn’t prefer using gedit or similar applications which come as native applications for Linux. His argument was because Notepad++ is highly extensible. So, I thought of looking at ways to extend gedit and make it gedit++ :) . Following guide will show how to extend gedit to make it even more powerful text editor that what it already is.

Enabling Line Numbers on Gedit

Line numbers are very important for coders and by default gedit doesn’t have line numbers enabled. In order to enable line numbers in gedit, go to

Edit > Preferences

Under the view tab, check the box that says Display line numbers.

gedit line number

You will now have line numbers on your gedit. You can also check “Highlight current line” to have a better typing experience.

Auto Save Gedit files

For lazy people like me who repent of not saving the file, there’s a feature that comes to your rescue. It enables autosave of file.

Go to Edit > Preferences > Editor (tab)

and select the checkbox that reads “Autosave files every”. I have set it to 5 minutes.

gedit autosave

Changing the look and feel (Making Gedit colorful)

Go to the tab on the preferences window which reads Font & Colors and uncheck “Use system fixed width font” and choose one of  the color schemes.

gedit color

Use/Install plugins

This is one of my favorite features. You can extend Gedit by installing plugins. Following is a list of official plugins:

Here follows a list of plugins currently available in gedit-plugins:

  • Bracket Completion: Add automatically a closing bracket when you insert one
  • Charmap: Select characters from a charactermap
  • Code Comment: Comment or uncomment blocks of code
  • Color picker: Select and insert a color from a dialog (for html, css, php)
  • Join lines/ Split lines: Join or split multiple lines through Ctrl+J and Ctrl+Shift+J
  • Session Saver: Allow to bookmark working sessions in order to get them back for further use
  • Smart Spaces: Allow to unindent like if you were using tabs while you’re using spaces
  • Show tabbar: A very basic plugin which shows or hides the gedit tabbar
  • Terminal: A simple terminal widget accessible from the bottom panel

You can install these plugins using the following command by dropping to the terminal:

sudo apt-get install gedit-plugins

Third Party Plugins

And if you thought you had enough of extending Gedit, wait there’s more. You can find and exaggerating list of third party plugins at:

http://live.gnome.org/Gedit/Plugins#third_party

Final Result


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  • Schleimbüffel
    Gedit is really a good editor but it is not meant for programmers.
    I hope they will implement rectangular selection, i need that all the time. A programmer's editor is useless without this feature.
  • BobCFC
    Code Comment is great because it deduces the language from the file type... I can never remember the stupid <!--- XML -!/>-->
  • BobCFC
    that last bit was an XML comment, which of course didn't appear lol #fail
  • @nikhil Hey thanks for dropping by. I think you have a plugin to achieve autocomplete for PHP. You can find it at:

    http://github.com/nagaozen/gedit-plugin-autocom...

    I checked with PHP and I was getting autocomplete option. Hope this helps !
  • hey,

    What about auto complete. i use php extensively and would love use auto complete all the time. Gedit lacks that
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