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.

Gedit is the default text editor for most of the Linux distributions using Gnome as the desktop environment. As it turns out and as we shall see shortly Gedit supports plugins and there are some very useful plugins for Gedit.

...the humble Gnome editor is often compared to Windows notepad app. A simple editor with minimal features that is pathetic for anything else.

Not true!

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.

Gedit is the "official" text editor for the GNOME desktop. It offers plenty of features that will appeal to just about any level of user

GNOME’s default text editor, Gedit, includes a powerful plugin system similar to Firefox’s. There are useful plugins available for both programmers and regular users.

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).

gedit is one of the little gems that you can find in the default install of any of the major Linux distributions in which you have/can choose to install the Gnome desktop environment (Fedora, Mandriva, Mint, openSUSE, Ubuntu etc.)