I love Linux, Rails and my Mac laptop. When I’m on my Mac I use TextMate for my Rails projects, but when I’m using Linux I prefer the simplicity of gEdit. However, I always have this feeling like I want gEdit to act a little more like TextMate. Well, there’s a way to do that, thanks to gEdit plugins. gEdit doesn’t handle Ruby on Rails syntax highlighting properly, especially the erb and yml files. So let’s begin with that.

First, I’d like to mention the gMate project. It’s a collection of plugins and other things to make gEdit behave and look almost like TextMate.

So check out gMate and see if it is for you. Me, I really don’t need all of the things gMate provides. Instead, I just grab the syntax highlighting files.

So, to get syntax highlighting to work in gEdit grab the necessary files from gEdit repository (I’ve also attached the files here rails_syntax.tar). Grab the rhtml.lang, ruby_on_rails.lang, yaml.lang and rails.xml files and let’s move them into the right directories.

sudo mv rhtml.lang ruby_on_rails.lang yaml.lang /usr/share/gtksourceview-2.0/language-specs/

sudo mv rails.xml /usr/share/mime/packages/

Now restart gEdit and your files should reflect proper rails syntax highlighting.

In order to get some useful functionality (like in TextMate) look through the list of plugins that gMate uses and pick out the ones that seem helpful to you (look here for a list of gMate plugins).

You can also look at this list for all the available plugins for gEdit.
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Here are the plugins I use and recommend:

• Snap Open or Open File (they both do the same thing)
• Zen Coding
• File Browser Pane (comes with gEdit)
• Snippets (comes with gEdit)

It is also useful for me to enable line numbering, set tab width to 2 spaces (using spaces instead of tabs), and turn on automatic indentation. Once I have all that setup, my gEdit functions almost like TextMate!

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