Medit is a somewhat simple text editor with all the usual features you would expect from it: it has support for tabs, syntax highlighting, indentation and more.
medit01
Tab support is one of the features, and you can switch between tabs using the Alt+Left or Alt+Right keys.
Options to quickly comment or uncomment code are also available in the Edit menu.
You can split the current window horizontally or vertically:
split
In the Tools menu there are two quick options to sort lines or to sort and eliminate double entries (Sort | Uniq). These tools can be configured and more can be added via the Preferences window (see below).
The Preferences window offers some rich configuration options for the interface and general behavior. Over Gedit, the options are more abundant in Medit.
config01
config02
And here’s a powerful feature, which allows you to write your own tools directly in Medit:
config03
Plugins are also supported in Medit, and several come bundled by default:
plugins
Some other features include shortcuts configuration, search and replace, bookmarks, text wrapping.
Overall, I think you can find Medit as the perfect replacement for Gedit, in that it blends well in GNOME and it comes with more features and powerful configuration tools. The ability to write your own tools (in various languages) directly in the Preferences window is a nice touch and a productive feature.
Installing Medit in Ubuntu 14.04
Trusty comes with version 1.1.1, and the PPA doesn’t have the latest release, so you can compile and install it from source by following the next easy steps.
First, install the dependencies:
sudo apt-get build-dep medit
Next, download the source tarball from SourceForge (direct link here), save it somewhere on your hard drive and uncompress it:
tar -xjf medit-1.2.0.tar.bz2
Now change the current working directory to medit-1.2.0 and issue the following commands to compile and install it:
./configure
make
sudo make install
Or, you can install it as normal user by specifying a prefix:
./configure –prefix=$HOME/usr
make
make install
In this case, the program will be installed as $HOME/usr/medit, so you may add $HOME/usr to your $PATH variable.