Graphical Text Editors

Though my personal preference for text editing is vi, there are a number of viable graphical text editing options in all the common Linux desktop environments. Today, we’ll look at some of the options in both Gnome and KDE.

Easily the most popular text editor in the Gnome environment is Gedit. Gedit is a powerful text editor with support for search and replace, customizable preferences, command line input piping, and the ability to revert to a previous version of a file, among many other features. Gedit also supports plugins for reading email, browsing web pages in text mode, and “diffing” sets of documents. Its primary drawback at this point lies in the Gnome desktop itself - your cut and paste from Gedit may not be available across applications.

If you’re looking for a strong contender in the text-based HTML editing category in Gnome, Bluefish is the hands-down winner. We’ve previously mentioned Bluefish in Penguin Shell. It features a full library of tags and markups for creating web pages, as well as more advanced functions including references for PHP, project management, per project customization, WAP-enabled site support, and a full set of wizards. Rather than serving as a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, the Bluefish interface is based on What You See Is What You Need. It’s truly a web programmer’s programming tool.

Several strong editors exist in the KDE environment. The first and most widely used is Kedit. Intended as a lightweight text editor, Kedit offers common editing features including cut and paste and customizability. It’s intentionally thin on additional features in an approach that assures it starts quickly.

The most recent entry into the KDE text editing arena is Kate. Kate is a powerful text editor supporting plugins, full configurability, multiple windows, and filtering. Kate is installed as part of the kdebase package. And, unlike Gnome, KDE has tied the clipboard cut and paste functions to all available apps. Your text will be available throughout the KDE desktop.

Regardless of your choice of desktop environment, there are many options for graphical text editing. They range from simple and quick to the high end of the power spectrum. Given the importance of text editing in Linux, choosing the graphical text editor that suits your needs can exponentially increase your enjoyment of your Linux distribution.