Exploring a side of gedit I hadn't seen before

Wow, suddenly gedit went from the notepad of Gnome to something much more. It's no Acme, but I wonder if you could get some of the same effects by writing a plugin like Tool Launcher that also exported a FUSE filesystem.

What amuses me is that he got excited over what is effectively a one-liner in vim (by shelling out to date) and probably about as easy in Emacs, I’m not sure why anyone would get so thrilled over being able to extend their editor when such a simple desire requires that much ceremony to fulfil…

Posted by Aristotle Pagaltzis on 2008-07-01

Aristotle,

While I agree with the simple example being overkill, I disagree in general. Most editors extension systems require you to learn their own unique extension tools like emacs lisp, gedit is just Python and PyGTK with editor extensions, which might not be a fit for many people, but are a good set of tools for me. And while the plugin architecture might be a little verbose, there's no reason that you couldn't write a plugin like 'Extension tools' that simplifies the interface for a certain class of extensions. All that said, I'm not sure I'm going to give up emacs as my editor for day to day tasks.

Posted by Joe Gregorio on 2008-07-01

Everyone laughs when I say I rely on gedit but that's okay, I have better things to do and keep on my active memory than lots of Vim commands. About the only things I miss in gedit is screen split diffs and replace on selected text. I've never tried the python terminal but thanks for the tip. Otherwise gedit is the project that gets no respect.

Posted by miles on 2008-07-01