9/25/2011

15 reasons why I prefer gedit

IDE features are language smells.
-Reg Braithwaite

I do not use any IDE, I just use gedit. Simply because gedit offers me what an IDE offers me. In this post, I'll be telling you 15 reasons why I prefer gedit above an IDE or another text editor.


So, let's get started with the reasons:
  1. Gedit is fast and small.
  2. Gedit is free.
  3. Gedit has a customizable(eg. themes) and clean user interface.
  4. Gedit has good syntax highlighting that allows you to create your own color schemes(unlike many other text editors).
  5. Gedit has all standard text editor features such as find and replace, the ability to count words...
  6. Gedit allows you to switch to full screen mode.
  7. Gedit has plugins and allows you to write your own plugins.
  8. The snippets plugin allows you to create snippets that can be inserted with something<tab>.
  9. Gedit has very good features for dealing with tabs and spaces.
  10. Gedit can auto save your files.
  11. The embedded terminal plugins allows you to have a terminal inside gedit.
  12. Gedit has word completion based on words you often use in a file.
  13. Gedit can automatically close brackets.
  14. The bookmarks plugin allows you to create bookmarks in your code.
  15. You can add external tools to build etc.
To demonstrate how good snippets work I made the following video:


2 comments:

  1. oh wow. Is there a windows version or is it *nix only?
    it sounds great.
    currently ive been using programmers notepad 2\
    but that doesn't auto close stuff.
    does GEdit have a version controll thingy?
    (like instead of saving many versions of a file you just save the differences)

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  2. @dr. octagonapus
    Gedit works on windows too, you should have a look at http://live.gnome.org/Gedit/. I'm not sure if there is a version control plugin, if there isn't you can always write one ;).

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