Lev Lazinskiy

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.

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!

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