Many users think that gedit - the default text editor for the GNOME desktop environment - is a simple editor that can only do some basic editing. In reality, it has many features that makes it a good choice for programmers. But perhaps the most important feature of gedit is its powerful plugin system. In this post, I'll concentrate on 5 gedit plugins that are essential for programmers.

If you drift between distributions, one of the first things you might notice is that Gedit, GNOME's text editor, is not always the same on each system. For instance, in Debian, Gedit is a relatively simple text edit, while in Ubuntu, it sprouts features that Debian users may never have seen. The difference is the plugins that each distribution packages with Gedit and enables by default.

When I first started using Ubuntu I wanted to find a text editor something like BBEdit or TextMate on the Mac. After flirting with both Vi and Emacs, I eventually turned to gEdit, the humble little default text editor for the Gnome desktop. But I quickly realized that gEdit is actually quite powerful.

Most computer users spend their entire life looking for the Holy Grail. In other words, they spend all their life searching for the perfect editor that supports all their languages, is free as in speech, has spelling, has highlighting… you get the picture. Obviously, there isn’t a perfect editor out there. However, some come pretty close. Ironically, one of them is one that any Ubuntu (or in fact, any Gnome) user has installed, though they may not know it. It’s called gedit (also known as Text Editor).

No program is perfect, mainly because too many features imply too much bloat. That’s where gedit’s plugins come into play. In this article, I’m will explain how to install and use some of my favorite gedit plugins.

Geany is a lightweight text editor for Linux based on the GTK2 toolkit. Geany supports internal and external plugins, and it excels as a source code editor, since it includes basic integrated development environment (IDE) functionality. Here's an introduction to using Geany's built-in features, including the IDE and built-in development capabilities.

"Back in the day, when I was new to [GNU/Linux], joe was the first text editor that I managed to quit without having to reboot my machine. That I am still using it today, many years later, goes to show just how simple yet powerful joe is.

Kate is the KDE Advanced Text Editor, and it does a great job for editing any type of text files, like Bash or Perl scripts, or C/C++ sources.

This is a awesome Class Browser plugin for Gedit. It supports many languages, includes: C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Python, HTML, XML, JavaScript, Tcl etc.