What is the standard text editor in GNOME?

Question

What is the standard text editor for GNOME in Ubuntu?

(I tried searching for it on Google, but did not find the answer.)

Answer 1

Ever since GNOME 42, GNOME's default text editor app is Text Editor, instead of gedit. Yes, that is a confusing name for a text editor, as it makes it hard to distinguish from other text editors.

Ubuntu 22.10 ships with GNOME Text Editor. You can install this editor on the command-line like this:

sudo apt install gnome-text-editor

Its executable name is also gnome-text-editor.

Answer 2

Simple answer: gedit.

To launch from terminal to create a new file just type gedit, or to edit an existing file, type gedit myFile.txt. You can also open multiple files at once into different gedit tabs, just by appending the other files to the command, for example:gedit myFile1.txt ~/myFile2.c /tmp/myFile3.tex

Answer 3

As AlexP and Danyc0 say, the main graphical text editor in a GNOME-based system is Gedit.

• Gedit project home page
• Gedit page on the Ubuntu help wiki
• Gedit on Wikipedia

Gedit is installed by default in all GNOME-based Ubuntu systems (until Ubuntu 22.10), and not just Ubuntu GNOME (which uses GNOME Shell). In particular, since Unity is really a shell for GNOME, systems that use Unity as their default interface ship Gedit, too.

The MATE desktop environment, used by Ubuntu MATE, is based on GNOME 2, but forked from it and the names (and executables) for the main apps are different. Ubuntu MATE thus ships Pluma rather than Gedit. Since Pluma is a fork of Gedit from GNOME 2 (not GNOME 3), the version of Gedit that Pluma is based on is older than the version of Gedit present in flavors of Ubuntu that use Unity or GNOME Shell.