gedit plugins for Ruby on Rails

gedit is the default and one of the most popular text/code editor in GNOME based distro such as Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Linux Mint etc. It has a lot of cool plugins to add some extra features, some are installed by default while some are available there in package repository, to activate just go to the preferences section and enable it; You don’t even need to restart the gedit application.

gedit is a simple, efficient, easy to use and powerful text editor, it has lot of advanced features that makes it really good for programming (if you’re more hungry for features, then you should try Emacs, although Emacs is little hard to learn but the extra productivity you will gain is incomparable, good for long run). But these features are not enough for a rails developers, so there is a PPA dedicated for rails developers (although it’s for Ubuntu but works well with any debian based distro).

GMate – The missing Gedit Plugins for Rails Developers

GMate is a set of cool plugins that will add some nice features to gedit text editor – in order to increase the fun with Rails Development (e.g by default gedit can’t highlight the ruby code in .erb.html files but gmate will do it for you!). Since gmate is a PPA for Ubuntu 11.10/12.04/older_versions so it will not work only on Ubuntu but also on other Debian derivatives. If you’re using Fedora or Archlinux then it won’t work, you may have to install it individually, see top 10 gedit plugins for the list of cool plugins.

Install GMate in Ubuntu

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-on-rails/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gedit-gmate

You can enable/disable the plugins from Edit -> Preferences -> Plugins.

Recommended Reading(s)

Gedit Shortcuts – Gedit Cheat Sheet for beginner developers, it also contains Gmate shortcuts!

Learning Rails ?

Check out this interactive video course on Ruby on Rails at Treehouse.