gedit
gedit is a UTF-8 compatible text editor for the GNOME desktop environment. Designed as a general purpose text editor, gedit emphasizes simplicity and ease of use. It includes tools for editing source code and structured text such as markup languages.
It is designed to have a clean, simple graphical user interface according to the philosophy of the GNOME project, and it is the default text editor for GNOME.
Released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, gedit is free software.
Features
gedit includes syntax highlighting for various program code and text markup formats. gedit also has GUI tabs for editing multiple files. Tabs can be moved between various windows by the user. It can edit remote files using GVFS (GnomeVFS is now deprecated) libraries. It supports a full undo and redo system as well as search and replace. Other typical code oriented features include line numbering, bracket matching, text wrapping, current line highlighting, automatic indentation and automatic file backup.
Some advanced features of gedit include multilanguage spellchecking and a flexible plugin system allowing to dynamically add new features, for example snippets and integration with external applications including a Python or Bash terminal. A number of plugins are included in gedit itself, with more plugins in the gedit-plugins package and online.
gedit has an optional side pane displaying the list of open files and (in a different tab of the side pane) a file browser. It also has an optional bottom pane with a Python console and (using gedit-plugins) terminal. gedit automatically detects when an open file is modified on disk by another application and offers to reload that file. Using a plugin (in gedit-plugins package), gedit can save and load sessions, which are lists of currently open tabs.
gedit supports printing, including print preview and printing to PostScript and PDF files. Printing options include text font, and page size, orientation, margins, optional printing of page headers and line numbers, as well as syntax highlighting.
Architecture
Designed for the X Window System, gedit uses the GTK+ 2.0 and GNOME 2.0 libraries. The GNOME integration includes drag and drop between Nautilus, the GNOME file manager.
gedit uses the GNOME help system for documentation. It also uses virtual file system and GNOME printing framework.
In December 2008, gedit binaries were made available for Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows.