How to make Gedit an IDE?

Question

I just want to do all my coding stuff at one place. So I am interested to make my Gedit a universal IDE. It should support at least C, C++, Java, Python, JavaScript and Markup Language.

Solution 1

Imho GEdit is far from being an ideal base for an IDE. You would be better off with an actual IDE like Eclipse and its various plug-ins.

In my experience it's also better to use IDEs specialized to a particular language, task set, or framework like JetBrains' IDEA (Java), PyCharm (Python), WebStorm (JavaScript, non-free), and CLion (C/C++, non-free) – they all have very similar user interfaces in case you're worried about that. Qt Creator is an excellent fully open-source alternative for C/C++/QML development.

If you really want to start with a text editor as a base and enhance it with developer features go with something highly customizable like Atom, Sublime Text, or Emacs and their various plug-ins and extensions. While GEdit is very customizable itself the existing supply of useful, up-to-date plug-ins is far smaller than for the other three.

Solution 2

gedit supports syntax highlighting for all these languages out of the box, and will usually auto-detect the syntax mode when each file is opened.

If you want to make it feel more like a heavyweight editor, turn on the side panel (view->side panel), set it to file browser mode, and use this to switch between the files in your project directory.

If you go to the preferences dialog, a lot of the syntax and indentation options are in there.

There's also an external tools plugin that you can enable for functionality like building from a makefile within the editor environment. I can't vouch for how useful this functionality is; I prefer to build from a separate terminal window so I wouldn't personally want to invest time into setting up that level of integration - but that's my own preference.

While it's true that gedit doesn't have as many plugins as editors like Visual Studio Code and Atom, it's still a fast and solid editor (the two I just mentioned have some wonderful features if you invest the time in customising them, but they've also let me down a few times in terms of startup performance, unwanted distractions, and even just maintaining file integrity when running in multiple windows; to the point that I no longer trust them as basic editors.) and a good fraction of the fundamentals are there. I would certainly recommend gedit as an entry-level code editor; at least until you develop a feel for what kinds of other functionality you're after.

Comments

[WinEunuuchs2Unix]

Great advice. +1