Gedit… for programmers

Long ago I had talked about sublime-text, a very, very complete text editor, and its many functionalities.

I still think that sublime-text it is quite powerful and worth using, but it has major drawbacks, especially some that conflict with my ideas and principles regarding software.

First of all, it is not free, and that must be made clear. It is very creative that unlimited testing time and very beautiful that it is written in Python, but not everything is honey on flakes and to be honest, it has a fatal error: it breaks you ladies marbles with its pop-ups of "Update to the new version" every time you open the editor, it doesn't matter that you already have it updated, it always tells you. Another toothache is that every time I save or close 3 files with that editor, I get another pop-up telling me "You are using the trial license, do you want to buy the license?" or something very close to that.

Ok, ok, I understand that you need to make money and I applaud that of the unlimited trial license, but that of spamming me on my own desktop ... hmmm, I kind of don't like it, so I decided to look for something that would better suit my needs "Stallmannian" (XD).

First was Kate, the publisher of the great KDE, which in itself is very good and all that, but, well ... it is not as extensible as some say, or is it that I am really bad looking, if so, please correct me and show me extensions for Kate. Sure, extensions to program.

Then came Vim... I could not stand it, it is too powerful, but that exaggeration in its power is accompanied by an exaggeratedly high learning curve.

A genie told me about text mate, but that's just for Mac and I gave him two rods in the head for speaking nonsense.

Then came komodo edit, a very high quality IDE that I thought would be the main contender for sublime-text at the level of supported programming languages, with a lot of power and relatively customizable although it lacked (or I could not find) anywhere anything like a button to compile or execute (a la Geany) or some Build-system (a la Sublime-text ), that added to the fact that I could not install it in any way but by running a binary ... better stay still there.

In the end I had thought of Geany, but I really don't like it, it is not very minimalist or as customizable as I would like it to be, although if it is very powerful, that will never be taken away from anyone ... After reading around there, I found that they talked about Gedit, which was supposed to be the most flexible text editor of all, what a thing one finds right? Right in front of my nose I had what I was looking for.

So, let's get to work:

First of all Gedit is a plain text editor that, by itself, can half supply some basic capabilities of a programmer, but not those of someone like me, who eats programming books and articles every day and wants to be programming all the time, so, it's time to extend our dwarf to turn him into a monster:

First of all, you have to download the main accessories:

sudo apt-get install gedit-plugins

And then put the following plugins to support new tools, themes and more programming languages:

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

Of course, many times we do not have these simple packages in our distros, I am telling you since gmate apparently it is a nuisance because it is not in the repos of anything, so it is time to turn to the dear Go.

If they don't have Go installed then look for the

paqueqte git-core

and install it.

Then you have to install the following packages:

python-webkit python-pyinotify ack-grep

And finally make the clone of the code from Go:

git clone git://github.com/gmate/gmate.git

And install it:

sh install.sh

With this we have installed everything we need to "poison" our Gedit and turn it into a beautiful, minimalist IDE.

First of all we need to start with the main thing, the marking of lines in use, the enumeration of lines and the automatic closing of brackets, braces, quotes, etc, etc. For that we just have to go to Edit »Preferences then we check the following options:

<° Activate line numbering.

<° Highlight current line.

          <° Highlight pairs of brackets.

Then we will go to the editor section, where we will move the following parameters:

<° Width of the tab: it is in 8, I use it in 4 for tastes but everyone can have it at the level they like, this will delimit the size of the indentation with tabulation.

<° Activate automatic bleeding.

          <° Create a save copy of the files before saving them and auto-save files every: “as long as you want”. This is especially important, we don't want our code to go to hell for some mistake and we don't have backups.

Now comes the accessories part. Here the thing would be very long if I talked about all of them, the good thing is that clicking on "about" gives us a very specific and direct description of what the complement is and what it is for. I am going to leave you the ones I use and the use I give them.

<° Complete parentheses: we know well how I use it.

<° Draw spaces: it draws points between each word, which allows me to know how many spaces there are between one and another.

<° Console

Python

: this tool is one of the essential tools for me and any self-respecting Pydeveloper, it is a nuisance to have to be entering the folders via terminal and executing the files manually, we better copy and paste, enter and voila, I'm working ... there are errors it will not run and will tell you what happens.

<° File browser panel: useful, very useful. This simply allows us to see our folder tree next to the screen to be able to navigate between the files.

<° Flush terminal: it is the same as the terminal

Python

only this is a normal terminal that allows you to do everything.

<° Cuts or

snippets

- just the holy grail of this whole thing, if you did the whole installation process and don't use

snippets

, it is better to give yourself a shot in the head, these are, to summarize and put it in another section, the completed car of

Gedit

, But better.

Typography and Colors.

This is more than all the graphic section that, although it is not something that does not allow you to work, it is something that makes your work very comfortable for several reasons. First of all, everything in white and black letters is uncomfortable, a little blue and fuchsia to highlight and voila, Gedit It's pity and shatters your eyes at night (if you're a self-respecting programmer, then don't program during the day). And this is where gmate enters; I explain briefly:

gmate is a set of add-ons, visual styles, and languages ​​for Gedit, that simple, brings us themes, more languages ​​and plugins.

Here it is simply a matter of taste, but what they have to choose from, they have. It actually has themes that I love, like Monokai, a theme with the same colors as sublime-text o dark mate, one equal to text mate.
But here everything depends on the tastes of each person.

Snippets or Snippets.

This is the highlight of Gedit, its ability to auto-complete, but not only that but also that it is 100% configurable since it not only already brings by default the most common functions of the languages ​​it has, but also allows us to add ours and even put its complete structure with symbols and even with fields to fill.

I quickly explain what to do, because simpler impossible:

First we go to the tools section and there we click on “manage snippets” (it is always in English) and there we look for the language we want to modify.

We will see things like this:

Well, simpler impossible, to add a new snippet just click on the "+" sign at the bottom, we give it the name we want and enter. Then in the field to write (marked in the image) we type what we want to appear when calling the snippet and if we want we can add some "intelligence" to them, example:

The set method of python:

def set$1(self, ${2:newValue}): self._$1 = $2

Ignore the syntax of pythonLook at the $ signs. They indicate something similar to a constant, they simply take the value over whatever they are assigned, in this case $ 1 takes the value of self and stops right at $ {2:} since another take of values ​​begins there. The second of the $, like the first, takes values, but what it does is take a value from a text field; {2:} is the following:

<° The {} indicate that this is where the programmer will enter a variable, value, text, etc.

<° 2: indicates that it is the second of the parameters.

<° newValue is simply the text that will appear as an indication that a value should be placed there.

In the end self ._ $ 1 = $ 2 what it does is:

<° $ 1 calls the value of the first self.

<° $ 2 recreates a

snippet

to enter a new value.

In the end this is the result:

It sounds complicated, but believe me, being an amateur programmer who studies at a bad university and who only has the internet as a backup could understand it, you can too. With this tool you will not only have a very powerful code editor but also extremely moldable.
Now to close and answer some questions that surely many have:

<° Is this only valid for languages ​​interpreted as

HTML

,

Python

,

JavaCrypt

?

No, in fact, if you have the compilers installed, like g ++ for example, you can compile from the embedded terminal with: g ++ filename.cpp or g ++ / filepath filename.cpp

<° Can I add more languages ​​than I already

Gedit

have with all this?

Yes, but that will be explained in the community forum, it is a bit more complex.

<° Can I create my own themes for

Gedit

?

Yes, but I still don't know exactly how to do it, it will be explained in the forum

DesdeLinux

when my knowledge on the subject is complete.

For now that's all, I hope you liked it and that it is useful to you.