Fake Web IDE with External Tools in Gedit

| software | foss | programming |

Gedit is my favorite text editor. I like that it is fast, reliable, cross platform, and has a ton of useful plugins and features. I am currently using it to work with LaTeX and unless I am working on a huge project, I will typically use gedit for all of my development work, specifically when it comes to web development. I use a lot of the plugins in gedit, but I have never used the External Tools plugin before. External tools is a very useful plugin because it allows you to do pretty much anything. The reason why I wanted to use it in the first place was to find a way to quickly launch HTML files that I was currently working on in a web browser, while also saving all of the changes to other HTML/CSS/JavaScript files that were related and currently opened in gedit. This is essentially what an IDE would do when you hit Run. In the past, I would just save all of my document and find the file in Nautilus to launch it. The problem with this approach is that I have an obsessive need to organize all of my projects into obscure and seemingly endless file paths. This can make it pretty difficult to find the file that I am looking for. The External Tools plugin solves all of these issues in a very elegant and simple way. So, without further ado, here is how you make a fake Web Development IDE in Gedit using External Tools.

  1. Enable External Tools: Edit –> Preferences –> Plugins
  2. Create a New External Tool: Tools -> Manage External Tools -> Hit the Plus sign
  3. Name the tool whatever you would like
  4. Assign it a shortcut key (optional)
  5. Set the following options on the bottom right
    • Save: All Documents
    • Input: Current Document
    • Output: None
    • Applicability: All Documents
  6. In the script editor, enter the following short script. This script will open the current document in your default web browser.
    #!/bin/sh x-www-browser $GEDIT_CURRENT_DOCUMENT_PATH 
  7. Close, and you are done!
You should now be able to use whichever shortcut you created to save all documents that you are working on, and open the current document in a web browser. This makes debugging much easier for web applications, and makes gedit a perfect lightweight web IDE.

If you have some handy tips and tricks for gedit custom tools, please share in the comments below!

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Occupation and Preoccupation

Here’s Jony Ive in his Stripe interview: What we make stands testament to who we are. What we make describes our values. It describes our preoccupations. It describes beautiful succinctly our preoccupation. I’d never really noticed the connection between th…

via Jim Nielsen’s Blog July 17, 2025

What do we do when the facts don't matter?

As a journalist by training, I have what you might call an addiction to facts. I believe that there are things that are true and things that are not, and that we can determine one from the other through observation, rational thought, and meticulous resear…

via The Torment Nexus July 17, 2025

Back to the Future

This past weekend, I decided to take a trip down memory lane and take a look at the evolution of this blog’s design over the years (with a little help from the Wayback Machine). While I’ve really enjoyed the challenge of making an obsessively backwards co…

via flower.codes July 17, 2025

Generated by openring