When comparing Gedit vs IDLE, the Slant community recommends Gedit for most people. In the question“What are the best Python IDEs or editors for beginners?” Gedit is ranked 10th while IDLE is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose Gedit is:
There are tons of [plugins](https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Apps/Gedit/PluginsLists?action=show&redirect=Gedit%2FPlugins) for productivity available in many different workflows, such as a dictation plugin, an encryption add-on, a whitespace remover, and more.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Plugins allow for added functionality and customization
There are tons of plugins for productivity available in many different workflows, such as a dictation plugin, an encryption add-on, a whitespace remover, and more.
Pro Great UI
The UI is lean and minimal. Everything feels quite fast and it is easy to add custom shortcuts for doing things like compiling, deploying, or testing.
Pro Available on all systems that use Gnome
Gedit is the official text editor for Gnome and it's available wherever any version of Gnome is installed. With thousands of people using it daily and not even realizing it.
Pro Sometimes simple is best
For short scripts, a heavyweight IDE just gets in the way. It's also easier for beginners to understand.
Pro Written in pure Python/tkinter
You can dig in and change how it works.
Pro Included in standard Python distributions
You probably already have it.
Pro Debugger
It has one.
Cons
Con Last line bug
Sometimes the last line of text is not visible.
Con Confusing interface
For example, finding anything in the settings menu is hard. Most other text editors use Edit->Preferences for managing settings but this is not the case for Gedit.
Con Faster than Atom but Slower than Geany
Not bad editor. Very similar to Geany, but Geany works faster and has more features.
Con Not a lot of features
Gedit is a text editor. Though it's simple and fast, it misses a lot of features, most notably auto-complete for several languages.
Con No Tabbing for Files or Shell instances
Idle's Interactive Python Shell and the Python Text Editor are separate window applications. Many would expect them to be unified together within a single window. To create a python program file, or module, the user first opens Idle (It's Interactive Shell), then the user goes to [File] and [New File] to open the Idle Text Editor. Plus, every time a new python file is opened, a new instance of Idle runs separately. So, there are no tabbed modules. That's clumsy approach that adds the complexity of juggling around many Idle instances.