Top 10 gedit plugins for Programmers

gedit is the most popular text editor on GNU/Linux distributions, specially – Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian, Fedora etc. gedit is very simple to use and requires no special skills to get started although learning about the features and shortcuts will eventually boost your productivity. By default, gedit is very powerful – you can edit simple text files and any source code (it will highlight the code accordingly). it’s fast and easy to use, that’s why most programmer prefer gedit instead of heavy bloated IDEs (such as Eclipse).

Gedit comes installed by default with the GNOME based Distro. Since gedit, like any other great free software, supports plugin-approach to extend the functionality, this post is all about some cool gedit plugins that will help you in programming with gedit text editor. There are some cool plugins installed by default, so you just need to enable it from preferences => plugins.

Install Some cool plugins in gedit

On Ubuntu 12.04/11.10/ or any other Debian based Distro

sudo apt-get install gedit-plugins

Fedora or RPM based distro

sudo yum install gedit-plugins

Activate the plugins

Open gedit and go to Edit -> Preferences -> Plugins and select the plugin you want to activate.

10 useful plugins for programmers

Snippets: Code snippets are good for reusing code blocks at multiple places without writing it again, in fact just by typing the trigger, followed by Tab key will insert the code snippet at the cursor. For Example – if you are writing a CSS code for a web designing project, then a CSS style can be used several times in the project.

There are already a lot of snippets available for use (for many programming language with intelligent Tab triggers that you can just guess after understanding the pattern) and of course you can define your own – custom snippets. You can also specify shortcuts keys if you don’t prefer to use trigger, not only that custom targets can also be specified.

File Browser: That’s really very useful when you’re editing multiple files together, as it can show you the files in a hierarchy. So searching and editing files becomes easier because each time you want to open a file, you don’t need to switch the window for a File browser program such as nautilus.

Bracket Completion: When you type a bracket, then it will automatically insert the closing bracket at the next cursor point. So it will help you in speed up the coding speed.

Color picker: For web developers who do a lot of CSS coding, you often need to insert hexadecimal or RGB color codes. This plugin will save your lot of time as you can get the color codes in the gedit window itself.

Code Comment: During coding, it’s good practice to put some meaningful comment – this plugin will help you in making a line comment without moving the cursor as it will detect the language and make the lines comment accordingly. e.g if you are programming in ruby then it will automatically add ‘#’ in the beginning of line (just hit Ctrl+m).

Session Saver: Using session saver plugin, you can bookmark the working sessions for further use. So basically, it saves a lot of time if you have lot of files opened from different directories and you want to resume the work.

Charmap: It is helpful in inserting various characters that you can’t find on your keyboard.

Tag List: To insert a string/tag without typing it again.

Python Console: it provides an interactive python console at bottom panel, and it’s really good for running your programs quickly from the editor window, instead of opening a separate terminal/shell window.

Word completion: As the name suggest, the plugin will suggest you the word while typing, by analyzing the document. Tab keystroke will complete the word as suggested. So it may help you in increasing your coding speed.

GMate : Collection of Cool Plugins for Ruby on Rails Developers

GMate is a collection for gedit plugins who uses Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu (11.10 – latest version, 12.04 is the next one). Ruby on Rails is the coolest framework for web application development, In rails, some files are having .erb extension which is called as embedded ruby in HTML. So the gedit may not be able to highlight that embedded code by default (but with Gmate plugin, you can). Most of the Rails developers prefer TextMate which is a proprietary application for Mac OS X, On Ubuntu GMate is a good alternative of TextMate. GMate will provide you a set of plugins to add some good features, lot of color schemes (30+) – specially useful for rails developers.

Install GMate in Ubuntu 11.10/12.04

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