Fake Web IDE with External Tools in Gedit
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.
- Enable External Tools: Edit –> Preferences –> Plugins
- Create a New External Tool: Tools -> Manage External Tools -> Hit the Plus sign
- Name the tool whatever you would like
- Assign it a shortcut key (optional)
- Set the following options on the bottom right
- Save: All Documents
- Input: Current Document
- Output: None
- Applicability: All Documents
- 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
- Close, and you are done!
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
- 2024
- Reinstalling Windows at 1am
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- How to Disable Wayland in Debian Testing
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Underused Techniques for Effective Emails from Refactoring English
- Death by a thousand slops from daniel.haxx.se
- The AGI economy is coming faster than you think from Freethink
- Rolling the ladder up behind us from Xe Iaso's blog
- In Praise of “Normal” Engineers from charity.wtf
- Reports of Bluesky's death have been greatly exaggerated from The Torment Nexus
- What Would a Kubernetes 2.0 Look Like from matduggan.com
- We Can Just Measure Things from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
The surprise deprecation of GPT-4o for ChatGPT consumers
I've been dipping into the r/ChatGPT subreddit recently to see how people are reacting to the GPT-5 launch, and so far the vibes there are not good. This AMA thread with the OpenAI team is a great illustration of the single biggest complaint: a lot of…
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries August 8, 2025How long does it take to upgrade an eBook?
The older I get, the more comfortable I become with complaining. Not merely moaning on social media, but writing a direct email to the perpetrator of some annoyance. I'd purchased an eBook and was appalled by how crappy the accessibility was. If you …
via Terence Eden’s Blog August 8, 2025P&B: Alexandra
This is the 102nd edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Alexandra and her blog, xandra.cc To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new inte…
via Manuel Moreale August 8, 2025Generated by openring