A colleague of mine clued me in on something I never even knew existed.  I used Ubuntu Linux, (if you couldn't tell), and I've used gedit numerous times.  (I've mostly been a vi guy, again...like you couldn't tell).  However, at least for my Groovy/Grails and PHP editing, I think I may be making the move to gedit.

Now perhaps you are like me and were thinking, "WTF...your basically going all the way back to notepad?" but after applying some minor tweak to gedit, I've got a lightweight, easy to use code editor and don't need to fire up Eclipse.  (Don't get me wrong, I don't think I'll be doing any major refactorbation in gedit, but for the majority of my tasks, its going to more than suffice).

This is not a tutorial on "how" to enable all of this as there are PLENTY of links out there for that sort of thing.  However, I do want to mention one thing, and perhaps I'm just way behind the times here having never had the opportunity to use TextMate, but gedit's ability to add "Snippets" to your code.  Simply enable the Snippets plugin and a whole new world of productivity opens up for you.

After enabling snippets you are basically given, and can create your own "keywords" that upon entering and hitting tab, you can generate anything you like right there in your editor.  I know this sort of thing exists elsewhere, but it feels so much lighter in gedit.  Its lightning quick and extremely easy to use.

Couple the snippets with a good code generator and the amount of keystrokes it takes to get something up an running is drastically reduced.

If you are using linux to write code and perhaps you don't quite like vi as much as I do, and you are looking for something much more lightweight than Eclispe, gedit is your answer.  Give it a shot, its my new editor of choice, (don't worry, I won't be starting a sudogedit.com site any time soon).

As referenced above, here are some links to getting gedit setup like TextMate, or a general IDE, etc.

crepuscular, Micah Carrick, grigio

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:wq!

Thanks for the tip! Snippets are awesome. After reading your entry I checked out gedit. Unfortunately, the snippets plugin refused to load on my system.

Also, it's probably impossible to take me away from Vim. I've learned many commands that make me more productive in Vim than anything else. Luckily, I found that there's a snippets plugin for Vim:

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1318

I tried it out and it's wicked cool. I wrote a few snippets of my own and the productivity boost is amazing.

It's your entry that got me intrigued, so thanks again!

Cheers,
Freddy
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:wq!