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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how often it's actually used. The niche appears to be "notepad for Unix like systems".

Meaning some intersection between a person likely to use Linux as a desktop, but wants an editor mostly geared for the not-tech-savvy.

Not discounting gedit, but it feels very narrow niche to me.

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I've been using gedit as my main programming environment for more than seven years now (mainly C++/JavaScript/Python development). It integrates neatly with GNOME 3, has a very clean, uncluttered interface and has all the features I need through plugins (Git integration, embedded terminal, word based auto-completion, block editing, highlighting of white space, auto-formating). Coming from DOS/Windows I never got my head around Emacs/Vim due to the "non-standard" user interface.

That does makes sense, but I imagined that most people that didn't like Vim/Emacs would end up in an IDE using the editor supplied. I imagined this middle ground as pretty small. Didn't know gedit supported the plugins you mention though, so that sways things.

I'd recommend Geany, many more developer features yet still quick and uncluttered, though you'll still have to go to the view menu and hide the sidebar and message panes.

I use gvim for big files and nano on servers, but for everything else I also use gedit. I have never liked any of the bulkier editors or IDEs.

Coming from DOS you should have been helped in that regard by experience with Boxer, Brief, qedit, WordStar, E, Tedit, and all of the others with non-CUA interfaces. (-:

Not at all. It is the default text editor for Ubuntu's Unity and Gnome Shell, so anyone using either desktop environment will likely use it at some point even if it is just for the lo-fi cases.

I use vim for a lot of stuff and IDE's like IntelliJ IDEA as well, but for simple stuff (like copy/pasting stuff from websites, and editing Markdown documents or simple text documents) Gedit is really nice to have. It's pretty much what Notepad should have been on Windows by now; simple, straight forward, clean, but capable enough (syntax highlighting, line numbering, etc.).

My girlfriend who isn't a programmer uses it exclusively for text editing. A graphical desktop environment isn't complete without a simple GUI text editor like Gedit.

I use it for anything that doesn't involve programming or markup: to-do lists, clipboard, relatives' birthdays, etc.

I used it for web development on fedora machine 6 or 7 years ago. It's like notepad but with some features could be notepad++

It was my favorite text editor for Mac, 2010ish. Then an update broke it and it hasn't worked since.

Interesting. Curious what about it made it your favorite vs other available Mac editors. I'm not a Mac person, but my impression is that unix/x11 ports are generally not favored by Mac owners if there's a comparable native application.

Safe to say it was also the first text editor I ever used for programming. I think Learn Python the Hard Way mentioned it (for linux users), so that's probably where I found it. My memory's a little fuzzy, but I switched to TextWrangler after that and thought it was shit by comparison. Then I was on a PC at work and used Notepad++ for years and now I'm back on a Mac using Atom, Vim and PHPStorm depending on what I'm doing, and all three of those are probably better than gedit. Still have fond memories though.

I guess it must have just been the clean simplicity of it. That was before I knew most of the keyboard shortcuts I use now, so maybe that's all it was.

So everyone who's not using Vi/Emacs is suddenly not tech-savvy. Okay.. What else would you fire if you wanted to edit a simple conf file on a gtk based desktop if not one of those three?

I think you may have read more into my comment than what was meant.

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