Configuring Gedit on Ubuntu Linux

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Gedit is the default editor on Ubuntu and a very good one. But to truly enjoy gedit's exquisite features we must know how to extend gedit's features by adding plugins.

So lets first install gedit plugins available in canonical repositories and later we'll see how to add plugins that are not in canonical repositories as well.

Open terminal from Applications->Accessories->Terminal

Now, on the Terminal window, type:
sudo apt-get install gedit-plugins

This will install a host of plugins (you will be prompted to give root password that you provided during ubuntu installation). Now I will enable some of the plugins that I use very often for software coding. Let's start with launching gedit by Applications->Accessories->Text Editor

Now get the plugins pane by Edit->Preferences->Plugins

You can choose any plugins you want to use by clicking on them so that they get "ticked". So, lets click on "Embedded Terminal", "File Browser Pane", "Code Comment" and "Indent Lines" and hit Close to close the Plugins pane. You should now see a Terminal window at the bottom and a file browser window on the side (if you don't, continue to read on how to unhide them) . You can hide/unhide the bottom pane by ctrl + F9 or enable/disable via View->Bottom Pane . For side pane, use F9 or View->Side Pane . For other plugins that we just enabled, their descriptions in the Plugin pane are good enough to understand what they do.

Now that we know how to use the plugins in the canonical provided package gedit-plugins, lets move on to some cool plugins from third party sources. I'll install a few plugins here like Darkmate (a beautiful theme that I like when my eyes are hurting and I can't look at the default white gedit background. Download the darkmate style file from here ). Move the downloaded xml file to ~/.gnome2/gedit/styles (create the styles directory if not present). Now close the gedit and relaunch it. You should be able to set the Darkmate style from Edit->Preferences->Plugins->Fonts and Colors

Another great plugin is "HTML Tidy" that you can install by following the directions from here .

We just barely scratched the tip of the surface as the point of this tutorial is to to familiarise a newbie user to how to extend the capabilities of gedit.