Basic gedit Features

Besides the tabbed editor window panes, gedit uses both a menu bar and tool bar that allow you to set features and configure settings. The tool bar provides quick access to the most common features contained in the menu bar. The menu bar items available are

• File: for creating new files, opening existing files, saving existing files, and printing files

• Edit: for manipulating text in the active buffer area and setting the editor preferences

• View: for setting the editor features to display in the window and for setting the text highlighting mode

• Search: for finding and replacing text in the active editor buffer area

• Tools: provides access to features for plug-in tools installed in gedit

• Documents: for managing files open in the buffer areas

• Help: provides access to the complete gedit user manual

One interesting feature in the File menu is Open Location, which allows you to open a file from the network using the standard uniform resource identifier (URI) format popular throughout the World Wide Web. This format identifies the protocol used to access the file (such as HTTP or FTP), the server where the file is located, and the complete path of the server to access the file. The Edit menu contains the standard cut, copy, and paste functions, along with a neat feature that allows you to easily enter the date and time in several different formats in the text.

The View menu allows you to customize what elements appear in the gedit window, as well as define how gedit formats the text in the Edit pane. You can use the View menu to disable the tool bar, status bar, or the side pane for the window. The status bar appears at the bottom of the window, showing the current line and column where the cursor is, the current edit mode (Insert or Overwrite), and the status when opening or saving files. The side pane produces a list of all the files opened in the gedit session. The Highlight mode in the View menu allows you to specify what type of text file is in the editor buffer. Gedit has the ability to use a different color scheme to identify different elements in a text file. For example, in programming files, gedit can use different colors for keywords, function names, and constants.

Gedit determines the type of content contained in a text file by examining the filename extension. Many programming languages use specific filename extensions to identify files, such as .c for C language programs, .sh for shell script programs, and .php for PHP programs. When gedit detects that in a filename, it automatically sets the appropriate file type.

The Search menu provides a standard find function, which produces a dialog box where you can enter the text to find and select how the find should work (matching case, matching the whole word, and the search direction). It also provides an incremental search feature, which works in real-time mode, finding text as you type characters of the word.

Source of Information : Wiley Ubuntu Linux Secrets