Gedit is the default text-based editor for GNOME desktop. I can say its complete because of its enormous features. Gedit is an open source text based text editor that can be installed in operating systems such as Windows, Linux and Mac (not just Linux). It is powerful for programmers with its wide range of features and plugins, which makes it appealing to any level and type of user.
Computer world is changing from time to time and I can say there is a considerable transition in the field of the text editors. In the early days, many machines were GUI less and the users had to learn vi editor. Well, fewer and fewer machines are GUI less now. However, it is always important and is considered an extra edge to learn the vi editor, which is more often than not, useful to edit configuration files. Gedit gives more productivity than all the other predecessor editors such as vi, emacs etc.
Syntax Highlighting:
Gedit provides syntax-highlighting capability with a large number of- Programming languages,
- Hardware programming,
- Scripting languages,
- Markup languages and
- Scientific purposes. (FCL, Octave, GAP, R)
To select the highlighting mode, select View -> Highlighting mode -> Select the mode from the drop down list.
Gedit Features and Plugins:
In addition to the highlighting mode, Gedit supports a number of features such as:
- Bracket Completion -- Automatically adds closing brackets
- Change case -- Inverts the case in the entire file
- Commenting or uncommenting a selected block of code.
- Document statistics -- Gives some information about the number of characters, words, lines etc., of the file
- Embedded Terminal
- Spell checker
- Tag list -- Inserts commonly used tags and words into document
- Word completion
- Sorting a document or selected text
- Snippets -- Insert often used pieces of text quickly mostly becoming the templates of documents with a specified highlighting mode
- Python console in the bottom pane and thus can run python programs.
- Language Support
However, some of the above plugins will work only if you add the external plugins, which can be installed with the help of Ubuntu Software Center, by typing in the filter text as "gedit-plugins" and click Install.
Colour Schemes:
Apart from all these plugins and features, Gedit consists of some Colour Schemes which customise the environment of this text editor. Some of the colour schemes can be downloaded here. These colour schemes can be installed by selecting Edit -> Preferences -> Font and Colors tab and then adding the schemes (.xml files) by clicking on the Add button there under.
