Tweak Gedit into a Programmers IDE

written on Sunday, March 9, 2008

Gedit is a simple text editing program that is installed with many Linux distributions. At first glance it does not appear to have advanced features needed for an IDE, but with a little bit of configuration it can be turned into a really nice code editor supporting Java, Python, C, C++, HTML and many other languages. A sample screen shot of fully configured Gedit is shown.

Before we begin, here is a quick list of Gedit's features:

Tabbed file view
Syntax highlighting
Inline command shell
Template code insertion
Basic tag browser
Session manager (save/restore windows)
Spell checking
Bracket matching
Auto indenting

Unfortunately, there are still a few features missing others might require in an IDE:

Syntax completion
Integrated debugging environment
Side-by-side window view (i.e. split windows)
Graphical syntax color configuration (text only configuration at this point)

Hopefully, the list above is manageable and may shrink in the future. So lets begin with the configuration.

Basic Setup

The first step is to enable some built-in features of Gedit disabled by default. Under Edit » Preferences, configure the View and Edit tabs as shown:

The next tab allows you to set the default font and color scheme. For now, check the box to use Monospace 10 font by default. We will come back to the "Color Scheme" options later.

Plugin Setup

The rest of changes in Gedit will be enabled by plug-ins. The default Gedit Plugin Page is a great place to look for new and 3rd party plugins. Feel free to browse it later, but start with the following ones for now.

Bracket Completion (Optional)

Some programmers might like this feature, but usually I leave this one disabled.

Code Comment

This is a really handy feature to comment/un-comment code quickly. Just us Ctrl-M or Ctrl-Shift-M to effectively enable or disable code. It also works on multiple lines.

Color Picker

For doing HTML programming or any document that needs color hex values, this plugin will bring up a color chooser widget, and insert the hex value after you hit 'ok'.

Document Statistics

I don't use this one too often, but can be handy to see your current line counts and file size.

Embedded Terminal

Provides you with a terminal window at the bottom of the screen. This is really great for executing your code or looking up man pages quickly.

File Browser Pane

One of the nicer features, the File Browser will show a tree on the left hand side, so you can quickly open other files in your project.

Indent Lines

Enables Tab (indenet) and Shift-Tab (remove indent) features on selected text. Enough said.

Join/Split Lines

The join split feature can come in handy when writing code comments. Just write the entire comment on a single line, and it Ctrl-Shift-J to split the line. It will also indent if your selection begins mid-line. Also good for dealing with files that are missing line breaks.

Modelines

For files that have embedded modelines at the end, this lets Gedit read those value and adjust accordingly. Great if you switch between multiple editors.

Session Saver

Another must have, this lets you build up project sessions, saving which files are opened. The next time you run Gedit, load your session and all your files are back to where they were.

Smart Spaces

This is a must have to allow the Backspace key to treat expanded tabs as a single tab character. Otherwise, you will have to delete every space of a "Tab".

Snippets

Auto text completion tool. If you learn to use this, it will make your life much easier. Insertions can be done with a keyword-TAB or a keypress command. The defaults install comes with a number of built-in examples. And you can add as many snippets as you want, all divided by language.

Spell Checker

Includes auto-spell check feature, but unfortunately does not restrict checking to just comments. Maybe it can be fixed soon.

Symbol Browser

This plugin creates a window on the left hand side that provides a quick way to jump between functions an classes of your code. Unfortunately there is no in-editor symbol browser yet.

Syntax Color Themes

Gedit provides a few built-in color themes, but there is no way to modify the installed color themes other than directly editing the theme files. The current theme files are stored in /usr/share/gtksourceview-2.0/styles. You can use these to create your own theme files. Once you have your theme file, you can import it into Gedit using the option Preferences » Fonts & Colors » Add.

If you want to find a specific element to change the color of, your best bet is to look into /usr/share/gtksourceview-2.0/language-specs/*.lang.

A sample syntax file is shown.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<style-scheme id="custom" _name="Custom" version="1.0">
  <_description>Custom color scheme</_description>

  <!-- Palette -->
  <color name="blue"       value="#0000FF"/>
  <color name="magenta"    value="#f066f0"/>
  <color name="violet"     value="#9587e9"/>
  <color name="cyan"       value="#00fbff"/>
  <color name="green"      value="#00ff00"/>
  <color name="bordeaux"   value="#d47575"/>
  <color name="orange"     value="#ffa500"/>
  <color name="red"        value="#FF0000"/>
  <color name="yellow"     value="#f1f16e"/>
  <color name="mustard"    value="#b8b86f"/>
  <color name="purple"     value="#bb41ea"/>
  <color name="grey3"      value="#353535"/>
  <color name="grey4"      value="#4d4d4d"/>
  <color name="grey7"      value="#7f7f7f"/>
  <color name="grey9"      value="#969696"/>
  <color name="greyA"      value="#a7a7a7"/>
  <color name="greyB"      value="#bfbfbf"/>
  <color name="greyE"      value="#e5e5e5"/>

  <!-- Global Settings -->
  <style name="text"                        foreground="#white" background="#black"/>
  <style name="selection"                   background="greyB"/>
  <style name="cursor"                      foreground="#white"/>
  <style name="current-line"                foreground="green" background="grey3"/>
  <style name="line-numbers"                foreground="green" background="grey3"/>

  <!-- Bracket Matching -->
  <style name="bracket-match"               foreground="green" background="#black" bold="true"/>
  <style name="bracket-mismatch"            foreground="red"   background="#black" bold="true"/>

  <!-- Search Matching -->
  <style name="search-match"                foreground="red"   background="mustard" bold="true"/>

  <!-- Comments -->
  <style name="def:comment"                 foreground="greyA" bold="false"/>
  <style name="def:shebang"                 foreground="cyan" bold="false"/>
  <style name="def:doc-comment-element"     italic="true"/>

  <!-- Constants -->
  <style name="def:constant"                foreground="red"/>
  <style name="def:special-constant"        foreground="red"/>
  <style name="def:special-char"            foreground="violet"/>
  <style name="def:decimal"                 foreground="orange"/>
  <style name="def:base-n-integer"          foreground="orange"/>
  <style name="def:floating-point"          foreground="orange"/>
  <style name="def:complex"                 foreground="orange"/>
  <style name="def:character"               foreground="cyan"/>
  <style name="def:string"                  foreground="bordeaux"/>

  <!-- Identifiers -->
  <style name="def:identifier"              foreground="cyan"/>
  <style name="def:function"                foreground="green"/>
  <style name="def:keyword"                 foreground="yellow"/>
  <style name="def:builtin"                 foreground="red"/>

  <!-- Statements -->
  <style name="def:statement"               foreground="yellow" bold="true"/>

  <!-- Types -->
  <style name="def:type"                    foreground="green" bold="true"/>
  <style name="def:boolean"                 foreground="green" bold="true"/>

  <!-- Others -->
  <style name="def:preprocessor"            foreground="magenta"/>
  <style name="def:error"                   background="red" bold="true"/>
  <style name="def:note"                    foreground="blue" background="yellow" bold="true"/>
  <style name="def:underlined"              italic="true" underline="true"/>

  <!-- Language specific styles -->
  <style name="diff:added-line"             foreground="#008B8B"/>
  <style name="diff:removed-line"           foreground="#6A5ACD"/>
  <style name="diff:changed-line"           use-style="def:preprocessor"/>
  <style name="diff:special-case"           use-style="def:constant"/>
  <style name="diff:location"               use-style="def:statement"/>
  <style name="diff:diff-file"              use-style="def:type"/>

  <style name="xml:tags"                    foreground="cyan"/>
  <style name="xml:attribute-name"          foreground="violet"/>
  <style name="xml:namespace"               foreground="green" bold="true"/>

  <style name="js:object"                   foreground="#2E8B57" bold="true"/>
  <style name="js:constructors"             foreground="#008B8B"/>

  <style name="latex:display-math"          foreground="#6A5ACD"/>
  <style name="latex:command"               foreground="#2E8B57" bold="true"/>
  <style name="latex:include"               use-style="def:preprocessor"/>

  <style name="sh:variable1"                foreground="#6A5ACD"/>
  <style name="sh:variable2"                foreground="#008B8B"/>

  <!-- legacy styles for old lang files -->
  <style name="Others"                      foreground="#2E8B57" bold="true"/>
  <style name="Others 2"                    foreground="#008B8B"/>
  <style name="Others 3"                    foreground="#6A5ACD"/>

<!--  <style name="python:string-conversion"    use-style="def:error"/>-->
<!--  <style name="python:module-handler"       foreground="magenta"/>-->
<!--  <style name="python:special-variable"     use-style="def:identifier"/>-->
<!--  <style name="python:builtin-constant"     use-style="def:constant"/>-->
<!--  <style name="python:builtin-object"       use-style="def:type"/>-->
<!--  <style name="python:builtin-function"     use-style="def:function"/>-->
<!--  <style name="python:boolean"              use-style="def:type"/>-->

</style-scheme>

This entry was tagged gedit, programming, python and ubuntu

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Tweak Gedit into a Programmers IDE

Basic Setup