For F36, the default text editor has been switched from gedit to gnome-text-editor. The new editor has some nice features, including GTK 4, autosave, and a dark mode. The new text editor is also available to install for F35.
We have a few weeks left to iron out any remaining bugs in gnome-text-editor and get it in great shape for F36, so it would be really fantastic if as many people as possible could:
Install gnome-text-editor from the package (not the Flatpak)
I will give it a try and come back with feedback! My usage of text editor is very basic though (and Iām easily pleased).
First few quick thoughts:
The repo version was impossible to find in Gnome Software - only Flathub version is shown as available even after installing it from the repo (maybe some sync problems on my side), dnf worked fine.
UI looks great, but of course thatās subjective. I donāt have an issue with it being barebones out of the box.
I suppose F36 will be shipped with version 42? As far as I saw on screenshots Christian posted on Twitter and his entry on blogs.gnome.org solutions to some stuff I would have problems with right now (eg. recoloring of the window, or rather current lack of in 41.1 causing the disappearance of the Light style ābuttonā after switching to Dark style) are in the pipeline.
huzzah! While I mostly use more traditional editors, I do run gedit for quick tasks sometimes and its dark mode support isā¦ weird. Looking forward to trying gnome-text-editor.
Installing it now in a toolbox, but why is Grubby a weak dependency out of curiosity? Pulls in 198 package?!? Seems to work nice, a good replacement for gedit. Iām not layering it though, Iāll test it in a toolbox for now until it hitās F36 as default then take it as an update.
Edit: So after reading @decathorpe comments below, I did a side by side and do see the font differences, and gedit is easier on the eyes when looking at the default light theme. Another thing is that gedit is somewhat more configurable, plus is extensible while gnome-text-editor doesnāt indicate whether it is in the preferences menu so I assume it isnāt.
I tried it out on Fedora 35, but something felt ā¦ off about it. Then I opened the same files side by side in gedit and gnome-text-editor, set the same font, and saw that font rendering is definitely ā¦ different in the new one.
If you zoom in, you see colored pixels on the right in gedit, but only grayscale pixels in gnome-text-editor on the left. Is missing subpixel antialiasing in GTK4 a known issue?
Additionally, turning off subpixel antialiasing, it makes even clearer that vertical lines seem to be much more blurry with GTK4 than with GTK3 (look for example at the top and bottom lines of the capital I in the screenshot). Googeling around a bit, it looks like thi is probably a widely known issue or side effect of the new and ācontroversialā vertical subpixel positioning āfeatureā that GTK4 uses?
I donāt want to argue that it looks worse, at first glance the text even renders more clearly on this screen, but my eyes water when looking at it, while Iāve been staring at gedit windows for years of my lifetime without having this problem I feel like the subpixel antialiasing makes the text much more pleasant to read, but maybe that is my imagination.
I donāt really want to open this can of worms again, but after Fedora had years to fight with its reputation of having bad font rendering (compared to e.g. ubuntu), but this āstep backā wrt. font rendering on Fedora 36 might not help with that
Iām a vi/vim guy so for the most part I donāt really use GUI editors. That being said I really like the look of the new GNOME text editor, and they implemented a swap feature so if my session crashes I wonāt lose what I was working on! Great work so far!
I didnāt notice Discourse compresses the image for my display, forcing Firefox to apply another resizing algorithm which makes it blurry. So when I opened it in a new tab, the right image actually seems less blurry to me.
gedit is good, because in terminal I can type ged+Tab with one hand to invoke it. Typing gnome-tex+Tab for gnome-text-editor requires both hands and multiple Tab presses until completion can finally get it right.
This is so disappointing. First, destroy a perfect text editor as it was gedit, to then fork it to GTK 4 and drop what is left of gedit. I use xed now, and no moving back, but thanks for the invitation to test
So after almost two weeks of (light) testing the only thing that bugs me is a bit worse text-background contrast in the default Adwaita color scheme in comparison to what gedit uses. A bit of something-is-off feeling shown on screenshot from @decathorpe is noticeable on my side as well, but I got used to it.
Besides that the autosave feature is nice, but the open-last-file-when-starting gets a bit of getting used to (also funny story, but at first I had trouble finding a way to create a new empty file, despite gedit using the same methodā¦).
so overall from my side, thanks for giving a chance to test Allan!
Iāve just recently installed Fedora Workstation 36.
I always used gedit as my default editor to edit source codes, but since yesterday, Iām having trouble with that.
In the former last version of gedit, there is an option ātab widthā which I can set to 10 or more, and then optionally switch to āinsert spaces instead of tabsā.
This seems to have been completely removed from the new version. To be honest, I really needed that, because the c ā#includeā directive is 8 characters long. I always had my tab width set to 9 or more.
From the filemanager ofcourse, sorry, right-clicking.
But this editor has become totally unusable for editing source codes. The old version (Fedora 35) has a much better interface to adjust the tab settings.
I feel like the subpixel antialiasing makes the text much more pleasant to read, but maybe that is my imagination.
from my side, thanks for giving a chance to test Allan!