Gedit plugins: Extension and customization guide

Vivek — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 11:12:53 +0000

Sometime 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.

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.

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.

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