13 ms·

Ubuntu 22.10 replaces Gedit with new text editor

39 points by agluszak 4y ago

ufo 4y ago
Does anyone know if similar discussions have happened in other distros? In wonder if Debian, Fedora, etc, have similar plans.
- freedomben 4y ago
  Fedora is adopting it for 36: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/workstation-has-a-new-text-editor-please-test-it/36130 https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/workstation-has-a-new...
agluszak 4y ago
Ugh, they made the buttons in the top bar no longer look like buttons :/ I hate this design trend
- tobz1000 4y ago
  All in the name of "cleanness" - yet it actually increases my cognitive load, as I have to hunt the whole window to figure out what's clickable.
  - jgalt212 4y ago
    Jony Ive continues to haunt my ease of getting started dreams.
  - mgkimsal 4y ago
    To go further, it seems to make things look 'cleaner' from a 'look at this screenshot' standpoint, and I understand that. But, this design style has an interaction load which makes it harder to use day to day, and I bet adds little 'microstresses' to users, even if they can't quite put their finger on any one 'thing'. "Looks cleaner" shouldn't have to be the mortal enemy of "easier to use", but it seems that too often things come down on one side or the other.
    - agumonkey 4y ago
      I believe that too. It also happens in games. Magazine can drool over infinite beauty of in game screenshots, while playing I see near nothing of all this (even though I'm fully aware of the acrobatics involved). It's a low usefulness quest for its own sake.
      - doubled112 4y ago
        Speaking of games and cognitive load, am I getting old? Or is keeping track of the button scheme getting more complicated as time goes on? Jump used to jump, and run used to run, and that was that. Let's use the Batman Arkham series for example. Every button seems to do something else depending on context and I can't keep track anymore.
        agumonkey 4y ago
        I can't answer, it's been years since I played something more complex than CoD (and even then it's due to younger siblings insisting). To me the most overloading part is the pacing and degrees of freedom. Everything is moving everywhere, yet somehow they manage to feel at home and instinctively act clean while I struggle to pursue the basics. I guess it's just young brains being too good at sipping whatever is required to play, while we're having to fit our legacy views and needs.
        Avshalom 4y ago
        It really got started with prince of Persia sands of time. Ubisoft spent a lot of time going on about their context sensitive controls (which they actually credited to sports games at the time) then it spread from there.
        mgkimsal 4y ago
        not the parent, but... I had to give up past Pitfall, Asteroids, Donkey Kong and others. One stick... 1-2 buttons - that's ... all I can handle. The switch to Nintendo and the "A-BB-B-UP-UP-X-Y-AABBA" key codes people would memorize from magazines... I just couldn't keep up. And that was... 35 years ago...
  - JonathonW 4y ago
    The thing has four buttons (not including the system-standard window control buttons)— how much hunting can it take? Not to suggest that this is a good UI (highly Gnome-styled apps like this tend to have trouble getting the right elements promoted to the toolbar and leave important things buried in menus or omitted entirely), but “I can’t figure out what’s clickable” here feels like you’re being deliberately obtuse.
    - rewgs 4y ago
      Couldn’t agree more. They’re standard close, minimize, and maximize buttons, what is so hard about this?
- heretogetout 4y ago
  My favorite example of this is GitHub's "convert to draft" link on their PR page. Not only is it flat, it has no indication whatsoever* that it is a link. * I guess it's possible screen readers can see it is a link
  - plmpsu 4y ago
    I always find myself Ctrl+F 'draft' to find it.
0des 4y ago
I hate Gnome UI feel apps.
- 11235813213455 4y ago
  agreed, too curvy, and wasteful of space. I'm still rocking my lubuntu 18.04 here
- TrianguloY 4y ago
  Same here, and worst of all is that in the past I though Gnome was linux (when I started using linux, Ubuntu was practically the only thing available to me) and I hated it. I then discovered there are a whole world of different desktop environments, and linux with KDE is now my preferred OS. On my job they gave me an Ubuntu laptop, first thing I did was install KDE desktop on top (later I discovered I was not the only one to have done that). It's sad because I know there are more people that rejected linux at first because of Gnome, so if you see someone that doesn't like linux, show them a few screenshots of non-gnome desktops first.
  - LoveGracePeace 4y ago
    It's good they let you run Linux on the Desktop.
barneygale 4y ago
It's literally named "Text Editor". Why is GNOME like this!
- monster_group 4y ago
  Seriously. You would think smart people who write such software would understand the importance of naming things properly and uniquely. Imagine trying to google to troubleshoot any "Text Editor" issues. You will get a bunch of unrelated stuff.
  - TingPing 4y ago
    Its "gnome-text-editor" very simple and SEO friendly.
    - alanbernstein 4y ago
      Where in the ui can you see this secret true name?
      - Joeboy 4y ago
        The best way I know is something like, open a terminal and do find /usr/share/applications | xargs grep "Name=Text Editor" Then look for the `Exec` line in whatever files it finds. This is obviously terrible, and not really "in the UI" like you asked. Maybe there's a better way but it's not obvious to me.
  - tambourine_man 4y ago
    It’s one of the two hard computer science problems, you know. Cache invalidation, naming things and off by one errors.
  - UncleEntity 4y ago
    Strangely enough, about the only time I ever have to troubleshoot gnome issues is when I do a distro upgrade and have to go fix all the new defaults to something usable. I’m sure fedora will follow suit and I’ll have to do some googling on how to get the new and improved text editor into a functional state sometime soon.
JCWasmx86 4y ago
GNOME Text Editor the most polished text editors I ever used for simply doing what a text editor is doing: Simply editing (plain-)text
Avshalom 4y ago
Are those three circles in the menu for dark/light mode? Did they devote that much prime real estate to switching between color scheme?
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Yeah, it's pretty goofy, isn't it? They also want to replace gnome-terminal with gnome-console which has this same look and feel, but is considered "lighter" and "cleaner" than gnome-terminal despite there being no objective indication that either of these is true. I guess the Linux user base is now dominated by people who care very greatly whether their terminal is normal or reversed or transparent, and not very much at all about anything else.
superkuh 4y ago
Hopefully this is just like the Ubuntu "switch" to avconv instead of ffmpeg. A stupid mistake quickly fixed in the next release. avconv and gnome-text-editor might be "cleaner" and mesh better with modern GNOME's copied Apple design principles but they can't do the same tasks easily so they're not real replacements. Nothing GNOME has done since 2014 has improved gtk or their desktop environment (except for high dpi support). It's all been downhill.
- xoac 4y ago
  The only thing in common to all of the desktop environments and platforms out there is that they have users like this for whom some old version was the "last good version".
- kwonkicker 4y ago
  It's about appealing to broader market. Missy people have no idea what ffmpeg is and even if they did, there is no way they can productively use it.
- krylon 4y ago
  Sometimes I feel a little bit for not giving Gnome 3 a fair chance, but I just never got into it. GNOME 2 was, to me, the peak of Unix desktop environments, and I was rather sad when the devs moved on to GNOME 3. Then I discovered MATE and was very happy because a) it showed me I was not the only one to feel that way about GNOME 2 and 3 respectively, and b) I could retain the comfort of GNOME 2. I couldn't really tell if GNOME 3 is good or not, because I have not spent enough time to figure it out. Maybe I will one day, but I'm perfectly happy with MATE, so unless something changes drastically, I'll stick with it for the foreseeable future.
- kkfx 4y ago
  Gnome community means RH/IBM business essentially, they are not the same but came on the same cultural boat, as a result they try to build things to sell, buildings powerless users instead of encouraging learning end evolution. That's is. Something good was and is done, in a rush of crappy design ideas just to make commercial product as some manager imaging them. The main issue unfortunately is another: lacking of proper clean and effective desktop GUIs libs aside Qt/G[TD]k witch makes newcomers feeling old systems styles when they see "alternative" WMs/DEs
ncphil 4y ago
Nooooooo! First thing I do on every Ubuntu install is change the default editor to vim. Used to use the Gnome editor a lot, but since the introduction of vscode I rarely fire it up. The old editor (which is still shipping with LTS) is probably the best of the Gnome apps. The devs' effort to replace it is deeply disappointing, but they've made it abundantly clear they don't care what any of us think.
- xoac 4y ago
  Let me unpack this post: 1. You rarely use the default text editor 2. You are very ("Nooooooo!") dismayed by the default text editor change 3. The old editor is one of the best Gnome apps, however you don't indicate whether you've tried to use the new one and what are its deficiencies 4. Just the fact that they are replacing Gedit however, is deeply disappointing 5. Obviously the devs don't care what "we" (you) think Nice.
- freedomben 4y ago
  > but they've made it abundantly clear they don't care what any of us think. that's a pretty cynical take. there are definitely some individuals that work on gnome who don't care, but in general I get the sense that gnome does care. just considering it from a practical standpoint, what if they tried to do everything we asked for? there are millions of opinions that are all mutually exclusive, but even if you filtered those out it would still be utter chaos, probably each dev doing what they think is best (remember gnome is largely a volunteer org). There are definitely things I wish gnome did differently, but I'm really glad to see the focus on making the developer experience better with different language bindings for gtk so one isn't stuck writing gui apps in C (or hacky python), and modernization of the toolkit, etc. I think that will help a lot because there will be a lot more choice.
night-rider 4y ago
Does anyone know where I can get this for Ubuntu 18? Sadly Ubuntu 20 crashes with my setup and I’m forced to use version 18. I can’t find it in the Snap store or Software Center. Is it strictly a version 20 app?
- aorth 4y ago
  Can you run Flatpak on Ubuntu 18? I've been using the nightly version of the new text editor on Arch Linux via Flatpak for months. I even filed a bug and it was fixed in one day! https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.gnome.TextEditor https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.gnome.TextEditor
slim 4y ago
Gedit has also the best support for bidi text ever. It's miraculous.
joseph8th 4y ago
Oh no! Anyway... I don't believe I have ever used Gedit for anything. Ever. I'm an Emacs guy. I won't be using Text Editor, either. Ever. If it accidentally opens a file, that means I need to change "Open Files of This Type With..." So all the gnashing of teeth and wailing seems a bit overwrought
dylan-m 4y ago
The new Text Editor is really nice! You all should give it a chance. Especially if you're using Builder as well. They share a lot of code, so it's pretty much Builder minus the IDE parts. (If you want the IDE parts, Builder is excellent and reasonably lightweight). Nice features: - Session saving is built in, and it even restores unsaved files, similar to VS Code or Sublime Text. This is great if you're jotting something down and don't expect to save it anywhere and then your battery dies. It also means you get the benefits of auto save, but without it actually changing the files until you tell it to. - Automatic editor settings via editorconfig / modelines is built in. You don't need a plugin for it. - It has noticeably better rendering performance. Which is not an especially practical concern most of the time, but it feels nice. It's noticeable if you scroll through a file with a device that supports pixel-perfect scrolling. - It looks pretty. Notably: - UI is styled according to the syntax highlighting. - Dark mode! (The syntax highlighting changes accordingly). - Special font for the mini map, which is very useful to see patterns and find a particular block of code. There are several gedit things that aren't in Text Editor and probably won't be, like the side panel and bottom panel and assorted plugins for those, but these days I find if I want those, I'll be happier in Builder or VS Code anyway.

39 points by agluszak 4y ago

ufo 4y ago

Does anyone know if similar discussions have happened in other distros? In wonder if Debian, Fedora, etc, have similar plans.

freedomben 4y ago
Fedora is adopting it for 36: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/workstation-has-a-new-text-editor-please-test-it/36130 https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/workstation-has-a-new...

agluszak 4y ago

Ugh, they made the buttons in the top bar no longer look like buttons :/ I hate this design trend

tobz1000 4y ago
All in the name of "cleanness" - yet it actually increases my cognitive load, as I have to hunt the whole window to figure out what's clickable.
- jgalt212 4y ago
  Jony Ive continues to haunt my ease of getting started dreams.
- mgkimsal 4y ago
  To go further, it seems to make things look 'cleaner' from a 'look at this screenshot' standpoint, and I understand that. But, this design style has an interaction load which makes it harder to use day to day, and I bet adds little 'microstresses' to users, even if they can't quite put their finger on any one 'thing'. "Looks cleaner" shouldn't have to be the mortal enemy of "easier to use", but it seems that too often things come down on one side or the other.
  - agumonkey 4y ago
    I believe that too. It also happens in games. Magazine can drool over infinite beauty of in game screenshots, while playing I see near nothing of all this (even though I'm fully aware of the acrobatics involved). It's a low usefulness quest for its own sake.
    - doubled112 4y ago
      Speaking of games and cognitive load, am I getting old? Or is keeping track of the button scheme getting more complicated as time goes on? Jump used to jump, and run used to run, and that was that. Let's use the Batman Arkham series for example. Every button seems to do something else depending on context and I can't keep track anymore.
      - agumonkey 4y ago
        I can't answer, it's been years since I played something more complex than CoD (and even then it's due to younger siblings insisting). To me the most overloading part is the pacing and degrees of freedom. Everything is moving everywhere, yet somehow they manage to feel at home and instinctively act clean while I struggle to pursue the basics. I guess it's just young brains being too good at sipping whatever is required to play, while we're having to fit our legacy views and needs.
      - Avshalom 4y ago
        It really got started with prince of Persia sands of time. Ubisoft spent a lot of time going on about their context sensitive controls (which they actually credited to sports games at the time) then it spread from there.
      - mgkimsal 4y ago
        not the parent, but... I had to give up past Pitfall, Asteroids, Donkey Kong and others. One stick... 1-2 buttons - that's ... all I can handle. The switch to Nintendo and the "A-BB-B-UP-UP-X-Y-AABBA" key codes people would memorize from magazines... I just couldn't keep up. And that was... 35 years ago...
- JonathonW 4y ago
  The thing has four buttons (not including the system-standard window control buttons)— how much hunting can it take? Not to suggest that this is a good UI (highly Gnome-styled apps like this tend to have trouble getting the right elements promoted to the toolbar and leave important things buried in menus or omitted entirely), but “I can’t figure out what’s clickable” here feels like you’re being deliberately obtuse.
  - rewgs 4y ago
    Couldn’t agree more. They’re standard close, minimize, and maximize buttons, what is so hard about this?
heretogetout 4y ago
My favorite example of this is GitHub's "convert to draft" link on their PR page. Not only is it flat, it has no indication whatsoever* that it is a link. * I guess it's possible screen readers can see it is a link
- plmpsu 4y ago
  I always find myself Ctrl+F 'draft' to find it.

0des 4y ago

I hate Gnome UI feel apps.

11235813213455 4y ago
agreed, too curvy, and wasteful of space. I'm still rocking my lubuntu 18.04 here
TrianguloY 4y ago
Same here, and worst of all is that in the past I though Gnome was linux (when I started using linux, Ubuntu was practically the only thing available to me) and I hated it. I then discovered there are a whole world of different desktop environments, and linux with KDE is now my preferred OS. On my job they gave me an Ubuntu laptop, first thing I did was install KDE desktop on top (later I discovered I was not the only one to have done that). It's sad because I know there are more people that rejected linux at first because of Gnome, so if you see someone that doesn't like linux, show them a few screenshots of non-gnome desktops first.
- LoveGracePeace 4y ago
  It's good they let you run Linux on the Desktop.

barneygale 4y ago

It's literally named "Text Editor". Why is GNOME like this!

monster_group 4y ago
Seriously. You would think smart people who write such software would understand the importance of naming things properly and uniquely. Imagine trying to google to troubleshoot any "Text Editor" issues. You will get a bunch of unrelated stuff.
- TingPing 4y ago
  Its "gnome-text-editor" very simple and SEO friendly.
  - alanbernstein 4y ago
    Where in the ui can you see this secret true name?
    - Joeboy 4y ago
      The best way I know is something like, open a terminal and do find /usr/share/applications | xargs grep "Name=Text Editor" Then look for the `Exec` line in whatever files it finds. This is obviously terrible, and not really "in the UI" like you asked. Maybe there's a better way but it's not obvious to me.
- tambourine_man 4y ago
  It’s one of the two hard computer science problems, you know. Cache invalidation, naming things and off by one errors.
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  Strangely enough, about the only time I ever have to troubleshoot gnome issues is when I do a distro upgrade and have to go fix all the new defaults to something usable. I’m sure fedora will follow suit and I’ll have to do some googling on how to get the new and improved text editor into a functional state sometime soon.

JCWasmx86 4y ago

GNOME Text Editor the most polished text editors I ever used for simply doing what a text editor is doing: Simply editing (plain-)text

Avshalom 4y ago

Are those three circles in the menu for dark/light mode? Did they devote that much prime real estate to switching between color scheme?

jeffbee 4y ago
Yeah, it's pretty goofy, isn't it? They also want to replace gnome-terminal with gnome-console which has this same look and feel, but is considered "lighter" and "cleaner" than gnome-terminal despite there being no objective indication that either of these is true. I guess the Linux user base is now dominated by people who care very greatly whether their terminal is normal or reversed or transparent, and not very much at all about anything else.

superkuh 4y ago

Hopefully this is just like the Ubuntu "switch" to avconv instead of ffmpeg. A stupid mistake quickly fixed in the next release. avconv and gnome-text-editor might be "cleaner" and mesh better with modern GNOME's copied Apple design principles but they can't do the same tasks easily so they're not real replacements. Nothing GNOME has done since 2014 has improved gtk or their desktop environment (except for high dpi support). It's all been downhill.

xoac 4y ago
The only thing in common to all of the desktop environments and platforms out there is that they have users like this for whom some old version was the "last good version".
kwonkicker 4y ago
It's about appealing to broader market. Missy people have no idea what ffmpeg is and even if they did, there is no way they can productively use it.
krylon 4y ago
Sometimes I feel a little bit for not giving Gnome 3 a fair chance, but I just never got into it. GNOME 2 was, to me, the peak of Unix desktop environments, and I was rather sad when the devs moved on to GNOME 3. Then I discovered MATE and was very happy because a) it showed me I was not the only one to feel that way about GNOME 2 and 3 respectively, and b) I could retain the comfort of GNOME 2. I couldn't really tell if GNOME 3 is good or not, because I have not spent enough time to figure it out. Maybe I will one day, but I'm perfectly happy with MATE, so unless something changes drastically, I'll stick with it for the foreseeable future.
kkfx 4y ago
Gnome community means RH/IBM business essentially, they are not the same but came on the same cultural boat, as a result they try to build things to sell, buildings powerless users instead of encouraging learning end evolution. That's is. Something good was and is done, in a rush of crappy design ideas just to make commercial product as some manager imaging them. The main issue unfortunately is another: lacking of proper clean and effective desktop GUIs libs aside Qt/G[TD]k witch makes newcomers feeling old systems styles when they see "alternative" WMs/DEs

ncphil 4y ago

Nooooooo! First thing I do on every Ubuntu install is change the default editor to vim. Used to use the Gnome editor a lot, but since the introduction of vscode I rarely fire it up. The old editor (which is still shipping with LTS) is probably the best of the Gnome apps. The devs' effort to replace it is deeply disappointing, but they've made it abundantly clear they don't care what any of us think.

xoac 4y ago
Let me unpack this post: 1. You rarely use the default text editor 2. You are very ("Nooooooo!") dismayed by the default text editor change 3. The old editor is one of the best Gnome apps, however you don't indicate whether you've tried to use the new one and what are its deficiencies 4. Just the fact that they are replacing Gedit however, is deeply disappointing 5. Obviously the devs don't care what "we" (you) think Nice.
freedomben 4y ago
> but they've made it abundantly clear they don't care what any of us think. that's a pretty cynical take. there are definitely some individuals that work on gnome who don't care, but in general I get the sense that gnome does care. just considering it from a practical standpoint, what if they tried to do everything we asked for? there are millions of opinions that are all mutually exclusive, but even if you filtered those out it would still be utter chaos, probably each dev doing what they think is best (remember gnome is largely a volunteer org). There are definitely things I wish gnome did differently, but I'm really glad to see the focus on making the developer experience better with different language bindings for gtk so one isn't stuck writing gui apps in C (or hacky python), and modernization of the toolkit, etc. I think that will help a lot because there will be a lot more choice.

night-rider 4y ago

Does anyone know where I can get this for Ubuntu 18? Sadly Ubuntu 20 crashes with my setup and I’m forced to use version 18. I can’t find it in the Snap store or Software Center. Is it strictly a version 20 app?

aorth 4y ago
Can you run Flatpak on Ubuntu 18? I've been using the nightly version of the new text editor on Arch Linux via Flatpak for months. I even filed a bug and it was fixed in one day! https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.gnome.TextEditor https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.gnome.TextEditor

slim 4y ago

Gedit has also the best support for bidi text ever. It's miraculous.

joseph8th 4y ago

Oh no! Anyway... I don't believe I have ever used Gedit for anything. Ever. I'm an Emacs guy. I won't be using Text Editor, either. Ever. If it accidentally opens a file, that means I need to change "Open Files of This Type With..." So all the gnashing of teeth and wailing seems a bit overwrought

dylan-m 4y ago

The new Text Editor is really nice! You all should give it a chance. Especially if you're using Builder as well. They share a lot of code, so it's pretty much Builder minus the IDE parts. (If you want the IDE parts, Builder is excellent and reasonably lightweight). Nice features: - Session saving is built in, and it even restores unsaved files, similar to VS Code or Sublime Text. This is great if you're jotting something down and don't expect to save it anywhere and then your battery dies. It also means you get the benefits of auto save, but without it actually changing the files until you tell it to. - Automatic editor settings via editorconfig / modelines is built in. You don't need a plugin for it. - It has noticeably better rendering performance. Which is not an especially practical concern most of the time, but it feels nice. It's noticeable if you scroll through a file with a device that supports pixel-perfect scrolling. - It looks pretty. Notably: - UI is styled according to the syntax highlighting. - Dark mode! (The syntax highlighting changes accordingly). - Special font for the mini map, which is very useful to see patterns and find a particular block of code. There are several gedit things that aren't in Text Editor and probably won't be, like the side panel and bottom panel and assorted plugins for those, but these days I find if I want those, I'll be happier in Builder or VS Code anyway.