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GNOME's Text Editor gedit 'No Longer Maintained', Needs New Developers (gnome.org)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gedit, the default text editor for GNOME: In a post to the gedit mailing list, Sébastien Wilmet states that gedit is no longer maintained and asks "any developer interested to take over the maintenance of gedit?"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?

20 of 239 comments (clear)

  1. Har. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    maintaining a great piece of open source software?

    It was ok once upon a time. It's a UI disaster now.

  2. Who uses it anyway? by TeknoHog · · Score: 5, Funny

    I don't gedit.

    --
    Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  3. Re:get rid of that crap by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If I took over this project I'd rip all that shit out and simply use Lua for everything. Developers are so stupid.

    And now you have five programming languages in gedit.

  4. Patience is a virtue by timlewis_atlanta · · Score: 5, Funny

    Just wait for systemd-geditd

    1. Re:Patience is a virtue by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Wait... Could we use Emacs as an init system too? It's got a heavyweight scripting system and even a half way usable editor.

      The short answer is yes. Even some years ago there were several pages on the practice. However, it's a dumb idea, because you need a static emacs. It's better to use sysvinit (or busybox, or whatever) for init, and just use emacs as the shell if you must.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:Patience is a virtue by tero · · Score: 3, Funny

      Fairly certain systemd is about to completely re-write emacs from scratch as a systemd service. It's vital for init sequence.

  5. 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/...

  6. Re:Open Source problem by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Exactly. I can keep on using Microsoft Office Accounting, Encarta, MapPoint, Windows Movie Maker, Windows Messenger, Microsoft Expression Design, FrontPage, Picture It!, Microsoft Money, and many other professional grade tools secure in the knowledge that with a huge commercial software company behind them, they'll still be actively developed and supported for many years to come.

  7. Geany by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've used Geany for years. Active development, lots of useful plugins, capable of being built with GTK2 or GTK3, etc.

  8. gedit has sure ticked me off by Trax3001BBS · · Score: 3, Funny

    He says using it for this post. I have a rather large hosts file. Using gedit I sorted it alphabetically and closed it without saving. It's now sorted.

  9. 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
  10. It's not Microsoft or SCO who hurt Linux. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Long time Slashdot readers will know how it was always Microsoft, and then later on SCO, who were accused of causing harm to Linux distributions, and open source software in general.

    Yet it's now becoming more and more apparent that it's not outside influences that are most harmful to Linux and open source, but rather it's the open source projects that destroy themselves by making idiotic and unwanted changes, which in turn causes the best users to flee to alternatives.

    This gedit nonsense is just a small part of the GNOME project destroying itself through the disastrous GNOME 3 released. GNOME 3 is a complete regression compared to the GNOME 2 user experience, forcing its best users and developers to seek alternatives. It wasn't Microsoft that made this happen. It wasn't SCO that made this happen. It was the GNOME project itself!

    Firefox is another example. Years of unwanted changes forced on its users by the Firefox developers have caused these users to flee to Chrome and other browsers. Now Firefox has only about 5% of the browser market. That puts it well below Chrome, well below Safari, and well below UC Browser for Android. Even Opera Mini, at 3.26%, has about as many users as Firefox 54's 3.75%! Now Firefox has become an irrelevant, fourth- or fifth-tier browser that's ignored by users and web developers alike. It wasn't Microsoft that made this happen. It wasn't SCO that made this happen. It was the Firefox project itself!

    The Linux distros that have forced systemd on their users is another example. Debian was once known as a solid, robust, trustworthy Linux distro. But it has lost that reputation now that it has switched to systemd. Lots of users have reported problems with systemd, as seen by the bug reports and mailing list postings begging for help with problems affecting systemd. Many of these Linux users have had to switch to FreeBSD, macOS, or even Windows in order to get a reliable OS. It wasn't Microsoft that made this happen. It wasn't SCO that made this happen. It was these Linux distros themselves!

    The worst enemy of open source projects isn't Microsoft or SCO. The worst enemy of open source projects are their own leadership and developers!

    1. Re:It's not Microsoft or SCO who hurt Linux. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yet he is speaking the truth.

      Gnome changes in 3 were UNWANTED. Fedora lost almost 2/3 of it users with that and systemd.

    2. Re:It's not Microsoft or SCO who hurt Linux. by mjwx · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Long time Slashdot readers will know how it was always Microsoft, and then later on SCO, who were accused of causing harm to Linux distributions, and open source software in general. Yet it's now becoming more and more apparent that it's not outside influences that are most harmful to Linux and open source, but rather it's the open source projects that destroy themselves by making idiotic and unwanted changes,

      This is and isn't true. It's true now but I remember the age when SCO and MS were fighting tooth and nail to destroy Linux. They were a lot more destructive than the most pigheaded designers or developers. The reason that errant project leaders seem to be the problem these days is because the SCO threat was destroyed and Microsoft have simply accepted that Linux exists and have given up fighting (no doubt due to internal changes during the late 00's), people who don't remember those times forget just how much of a threat they were. The fact there is still a FOSS community is because these threats were destroyed almost a decade ago.

      In that respect it is a good thing the worst thing about the open source community is that we have developers making unwanted changes. In a way this is good as it spurs new projects but that's a useful side effect to a bad thing, like the way that a bad gastro bug promotes weight loss. I think the biggest threat to open source is apathy. We've rested on our laurels too much, become too comfortable and now we have another company rising that threatens to be worse than Microsoft... and many here herald their rise with celebrator cheer.

      Firefox is another example. Years of unwanted changes forced on its users by the Firefox developers have caused these users to flee to Chrome and other browsers

      Not strictly true. The worst mistake the Firefox developers made was not taking the mobile device market seriously.

      The other problem they have is one that Open Source railed against for years under the iron fisted reign of Microsoft... pre-installed browsers. Every Android device comes with Chrome, a lot of personal computers come with Chrome pre-installed. A lot of Chrome's user base is there because they've thought to use another browser, this is why Chrome has the lions share of the market (50% +). Safari is the same, but restricted to Apple devices which is why it's in 2nd place with 14% of the market. In fact in the case of most Apple devices, users have no choice but to use Safari. This is why I consider Apple to be the new Microsoft... and they aren't nearly as... shall we say "nice" as Microsoft were in the 90's and 00's.

      Apple is now the threat, not just to Open Source, but to almost all the freedom we've come to expect from computers. Imagine if Microsoft prohibited any other browser but Edge in Windows 11, or forced us to go to the Microsoft store to get software because we couldn't install it from any other source... We'd nail MS to the wall, well if there were anything left to nail to the wall after their partners and major clients were finished with them... So why do we accept this behaviour from Apple?

      If your answer to that question is anything but "I don't and nor should anyone else" then you are part of the problem. Apple are already committing the same excesses that made Microsoft so hated and despised in the 90's... but in a far more extreme form and are being celebrated for it. Apple abides open source as long as they get what they want, but what they want is total control so you're gambling that they'll come for open source last. Fortunately, we still have an option and powerful opposition to Apple, unfortunately it's Google. Much as we relied on IBM to destroy SCO, not because IBM cared about FOSS, but because IBM and FOSS shared a common enemy, FOSS and in fact anyone who wants to have any form of control over their computer is now depending on Google... and as much as I dislike a monoculture, Google's is far less restrictive and destructive than Apple's.

      No doubt the fanboys are frothing at the mouth, ready to mod this into oblivion but this needs to be said and I will not be scared of saying it because it offends a few fanboys.

      --
      Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
  11. 4 languages by steveha · · Score: 3, Interesting

    gedit is written in C. There is a little bit of Objective-C for Mac OS X support. Then plugins are written in Vala or Python.

    Why is this rant-worthy? IMHO Python is a great choice for writing plugins. And for a while GNOME was pushing Vala so that is not a shock.

    Seems like Sebastien Wilmet is nakedly trying to encourage people to want gedit to die. After the language rant he says that helping gedit also helps some guy who sells gedit on the Mac. He also rants that gedit ought to be a super-thin shell around his new project Tepl, libraries for text editor features. This is a weird and barely-concealed agenda.

    I am not going to volunteer for this, but it's because I am busy, not because I am scared of a project with 4 languages.

    --
    lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
  12. Re:Open Source problem by ckatko · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Actually, MSPaint is being discontinued and people still love it.

    Then again, MS broke it in Windows 7 and literally never fixed it since then. Go ahead, zoom 2x or higher, and try and adjust the canvas size by shrinking it inward. The second you let go, it actually shrinks further in.

    Also, Microsoft discontinues SUPPORT of products before they even discontinue them. Everything has to be Office 365. Got Office 2010? It'll work with CRM 2016. Except it won't, because you need the CRM Plugin for Outlook which DOESN'T support 2010.

    BUT WAIT. It also only supports IE10 and IE11. No Edge browser. Wait. WHAT? (And God forbid they support competitors browsers on this thing called The Internet which is supposed to be designed for compatibility.) Even funnier is, when we were supporting a client, we had to escalate to the (India) Microsoft CRM team, who then instructed us to "Try using it in Chrome" when IE kept breaking.

    Microsoft is a complete shitshow of compatibility. Half of it is intentional, the other half is their company is in complete disarray. Every year I support their products, I lose a little more respect for them. I have written page-long replies on Slashdot before detailing my horror with their lack of actual compatibility between products. (Like how you can make textfields in SQL that are too long that will crash Microsoft's import/export tool. So you can basically never migrate certain databases without insane workarounds like 3rd-party ODBC drivers.)

  13. Use well maintained alternatives by grumpy-cowboy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Emacs and/or Vim.

    --
    Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
  14. Re:and? by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 3, Funny

    just let it die

    But then we'll have no way to open files saved in gedit's proprietary plaintext format! I've literally got hundreds of .txt files on my hard drive!

    --
    #DeleteChrome
  15. Could "no longer maintained" == "STABLE"? by DutchUncle · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Some things get to the point where they serve their purpose well, and they don't need changing any more. People don't invent new flatware to eat with; companies keep coming out with new patterns, but everything is pretty much the same size and weight and angles, and forks usually have four tines, and the designs are pretty well set. The FOSS community seems to think that constant change is good; most products in the real world stabilize.