Gedit can be transformed into a powerful light-weight IDE.

Before I tell you the steps take a look at the screenshot of my gedit:

Now, if you are convinced that you also want to customize gedit read on …..

Step 1: Go to edit->Preferences and tick the options :

• Display line numbers
• Highlight current line
• Highlight matching bracket

Step 2:  Click the ‘Editor’ tab in the preferences dialog box. Tick the option :

• Enable Automatic indentation
• [optional] change tab width to 4 or whatever width you think is appropriate for you.

Step 3: Download the darkmate theme : http://grigio.org/files/darkmate.xml Save the xml file on your desktop. Click the ‘Font & Colors’ tab in the Preferences dialog box. Click the Add button and then add the xml file downloaded just now. Darkmate theme should now be in the list of Color Scheme. Select the Darkmate theme. Or you can select any Color Scheme you like. You can get more themes from http://live.gnome.org/GtkSourceView/StyleSchemes

Step 4: Now install the package gedit-plugins . This can be accomplished by

$ sudo aptitude install gedit-plugins

(in Debian based system)

or

$ su

# yum install gedit-plugins

(in rpm based system)

After installing the gedit-plugins package open the tab ‘Plugins’ in the Preferences dialog box.

Tick the following plugins:

• Bracket Completion – This will automatically print right brackt/parantheses for every left counterpart.
• Code Comment – This plugin helps you in commenting a block of code
• [optional] Color Picker – This is helpful for web designers to get the color code.
• Draw Spaces – This plugin will draw an arrow for every tab and one dot for every space. You can configure the color of the space or tab by clicking the “Configure Plugin”
• Embedded Terminal – This will embed a gnome-terminal at the bottom of your gedit window.
• Execute Tools
• File Browser Pane
• Indent Lines – This plugin helps you in indenting a block of code.
• Session Saver – This plugin helps you save different sessions.

You can check out other plugins according to your need.

Step 5 : You can get more gedit plugins like “Word Completion” and many more useful 3rd party plugins on this page – http://live.gnome.org/Gedit/Plugins

Download whatever plugin you wish and just place the extracted files in ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins

You are done !

P.S: Please let me know if you find a useful plugin for gedit.