Text editors are very important both for developers as well as for the average user. In Ubuntu there are many text editors for text editing such as Emacs,Vim,Nano etc but the simplest one of all is “Gedit”. Gedit is the default text editor for the gnome environment and comes pre-intsalled in Ubuntu. You can open it from Applications → Accessories → gedit text editor. Besides Linux this editor is also available for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X platforms and is released under the GNU GPL license. Language behind this text editor is C,Python. When you first open this editor, you will compare it with the windows “Notepad” because of its similar GUI but believe me guys it much more than notepad. –
What makes gedit interesting is its plugins and features. You can view the plugins menu by going to Edit → Preferences → Plugins tab. So lets take a look at the five most used and interesting plugins of Gedit.
- Snippet → My most favorite and most important plugin of Gedit would be “Snippet”. For developers it’s like a magic wand. If you are using snippet , you will save your time in writing syntax’s of the code. Snippet provides you some predefined syntax’s of the languages . Example → I am using python and using a “for” loop. I have enabled my snippet setting such that as soon as I write for and press “tab key” it shows me the whole “for” loop syntax on the screen.You can see the screenshot below below.
Best part of gedit is that you can also define your own syntax if its not present in the language list to save the time. You can manage the snippet according to your language preferences. To do this go to tools → manage snippet → select a language → select syntax.
- Change Case → We often struggle with the character cases while writing a document. Conversion of the text into lower case,into upper case etc is a very common problem. But “Change Case” plugin helps us to do this task within seconds. All you have to do is just select the text and go to the edit → change case → select the case type. Options available are “All Lower Case”, “All Upper Case” , “Invert Case” , “Title Case”.
- Embedded Terminal → Geeks love to hang out on the terminal most of the time. How about a terminal within your text editor. Strange but true!! With the “external tools” and “Embedded terminal” plugin on you can have a bash shell terminal right at the bottom of your gedit. So work on the text in gedit and run the shell alonside. Below is the screenshot of the same
- Document Statistics → Want to know how many lines are there in your text document or even the words,characters ??? Gedit provides you a simple way to check all this by simple enabling the plugin “Document Statistics”. All you have to do is just follow this path (Tools → Document Statistics). After that you will see a GUI just like the screenshot below telling you about every miniscule detail of your document.
- Word Completion → As you can predict by the name, this plugin automatically shows you the options of the word completion as soon as you start typing. It recollects the word that you have used in the document. When you start using the same word again in the document it shows you the dialog box with the word suggestion.
