The default text editor that comes with Ubuntu or Linux Mint is Gedit. A simple yet powerful text editor that makes Notepad (Windows’ default text editor) look like loser when it comes to features. That said, I wonder why Microsoft never tried to improve Notepad, any ideas?. Anyways, though Gedit itself is quite powerful and recognizes many programming languages, still there are many plugins available for free that makes Gedit much more powerful.

How to install the Gedit plugins?

Install the gedit-plugins package. This package contains a great deal of gedit plugins apart from what is already present in Gedit (but not enabled by default). Open the terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and type the following command:

sudo apt-get install gedit-plugins

Once you have the plugins installed, you can access them by using the following steps:

• Open Gedit text editor
• From the Top Menu, go to this path: Edit->Preferences
• Here go to Plugins tab. You will see the list of plugins available here. You can enable or disable, by checking the box next to them, as per your requirement.
  

The best Gedit Plugins:

Okay! Here comes the list of best Gedit plguins that, in my opinion, are extremely useful especially for programmers. The numbers given to plugins don’t mean that one is better than other. Its just to keep a count.

1. Session Saver:

When you work on a project you might have several files open at the same time and when you are logging off you might feel a need of saving the session so that when you login again and open Gedit you will have all your files back together in the editor. This saves a lot of trouble for you as you don’t need to find the same files again and open them individually.

2. Code Comment:

You just cannot write a program without using comments (If you do, you my friend, are no programmer). This plugin lets you comment or uncomment using short cuts Ctrl+M and Ctrl+Shift+M respectively. The good thing is that it recognizes the language you are using and comments accordingly for e.g., // for C++ or # for Shell scripts.

3. Snippets:

You find a few lines of code is needed to be written at several places. Snippet is the plugin for you. You save the code snippet and place a trigger on it. Trigger is like a pet name of the snippet. Now you can use the saved code snippets by just using the trigger name and tab. It will automatically complete the code.

4. Bracket Competition:

Remember Eclipse or any other IDE? All of them have this beautiful feature where when you type a bracket and it automatically puts the closing brackets. This plugins give you the same feature in Gedit as well.

5. Embedded Terminal:

This plugin embeds a terminal in the bottom of the Gedit. So you can run your commands and have a look at the editor at the same time. Extremely useful if you do not have access to multiple monitors.

There are many more plugins as well. Honorable mentions would be External Tools, Word Competitions, File Browser, Character Map.

What are you favorite Gedit plugins? Do share it with us.