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GNOME's Text Editor gedit 'No Longer Maintained', Needs New Developers (gnome.org)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the core-applications dept.

AmiMoJo brings news about gedit, the default text editor for GNOME: In a post to the gedit mailing list, Sébastien Wilmet states that gedit is no longer maintained and asks "any developer interested to take over the maintenance of gedit?" Just in case you were considering it, he warns "BTW while the gedit core is written in C (with a bit of Objective-C for Mac OS X support), some plugins are written in Vala or Python. If you take over gedit maintenance, you'll need to deal with four programming languages (without counting the build system). The Python code is not compiled, so when doing refactorings in gedit core, good luck to port all the plugins (the Python code is also less "greppable" than C). At least with Vala there is a compiler, even if I would not recommend Vala."
Sébastien's comments were surrounded by a <rant-on-languages> tag, but they're still crying out for some serious discussion. Any Slashdot readers want to share their own insights on Python, some fond thoughts on gedit, or suggestions for maintaining a great piece of open source software?

3 of 239 comments (clear)

  1. We all saw it coming... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    A Slashdot commenter predicted the demise of gedit almost three years ago. The core of this argument was the following:

    Hipsters are killing open source projects left and right with their fucking awful UI changes.

    Just look at what happened to gedit. It's a text editor that comes with GNOME.

    Gedit used to look like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Gedit2261.png

    It had a clean, usable, consistent UI. The major functionality was easily available, and the UI was extremely intuitive and efficient to use.

    The hipsters can't stand for usable software, of course. It needed to be "improved"!

    This is what gedit looks like more recently: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Gedit_3.11.92.png

    I'm not joking. That's really what it looks like. Using it is even worse than it looks.

    Gedit's UI today is fucking awful.

    1. Re:We all saw it coming... by JustNiz · · Score: 5, Informative

      Totally agree, I absolutely hated that switch. It was so obviously bad that for the longest time I honestly thought it must be a bug or something.

      Anyway, I just use Pluma instead. Its basically a branch of Gedit that kept the old interface.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

  2. Re:Pluma by Misagon · · Score: 5, Informative

    For me, "Pluma" is the real gedit anyway.
    One of the first things when I upgraded from GNOME 2.0 to Mate was to add an alias. Too bad that it uses GTK+ 3.0 now though, with the crap scrollbar and the annoying smooth scrolling that can't be turned off.

    Pluma is still actively maintained, as is the core of both forks: GtkSourceView.
    The rest of GNOME 3's "gedit" is specific to GNOME 3. Let it die!

    --
    "We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley