Gedit Text Editor Released 49.0 with Much Faster Big File Loading

Gedit, the classic GTK based text editor, released new 49.0 version few days ago.

For those who are new to Linux, Gedit was the default text editor for Ubuntu and Fedora etc Linux Distributions with GNOME desktop. And, it’s still the default in old Ubuntu LTS releases (e.g., 20.04, 18.04, 16.04) that are supported by either expanded security maintenance or legacy add-on.

Since GNOME 42 introduced new Gnome-Text-Editor, Gedit is no longer the default. But, it’s still being maintained by Gnome Team members, and v49.0 is so far the latest version that was announced in last week.

The new Gedit version significantly improved the performance for loading big files. It didn’t explain how it was implemented, but it’s much faster now!

In my test, the new Gedit takes less than 2 seconds (include app launch time) loading a 26 MB text file, while the last 48.1 uses more than 10 seconds for loading the same file.

However, loading very large files can still freeze the Gedit window for a few seconds. So, it now refuses to load very large files by default in 200 MB or higher size. Though, user may override this limit by editing the value of the gsettings key below:

org.gnome.gedit.preferences.editor max-file-size

Besides that, Gedit 49.0 removed Python plugins support, even for third-party plugins.

The reason is that both GTK and Gnome are now moving faster, but, Gedit as an non-core project does not have too many maintainers.

Gnome updates had made it hard for loading Python plugins. And, for Windows, the package will be smaller and launch faster without bundle of whole Python interpreter.

So, the developer team decided to reduce the number of programming languages to deal with and focus on C. Though, third-party plugins can still be implemented in C, Vala, C++ and maybe Rust.

And, due to removal of Python plugin support, some plugins such as Bracket Completion, Join/Split Lines, Multi Edit, and Session Saver are removed. Though, it is planned and desired to bring back some of the removed plugins.

Other changes include:

• New “Reset All” button in preference.
• Ability to change language for Spell Checker.
• Better Windows support.
• New symbolic app icon.
• Use X11 backend only on Linux (XWayland on Wayland session), which fixed some bugs.
• New website.

For more about it, see the release note in new domain.

How to Install Gedit 49.0

The Gedit text editor is available to install in Windows through Microsoft Store, in macOS through Homebrew.

For Linux, it provides official installer package through the Flatpak package that runs in sandbox environment.

Linux Mint and Fedora Workstation (with 3rd party repository enabled) may search & install it directly from either Software Manager or GNOME Software.

While Debian/Ubuntu and their based distributions may run the 2 commands one by one to install:

sudo apt install flatpak

flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.gnome.gedit.flatpakref

And, for those who would like to report issues or get the source, go to the gitlab.gnome.org source page.

Source: UbuntuHandbook