When comparing Gedit vs qemacs (for quick emacs), the Slant community recommends Gedit for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” Gedit is ranked 22nd while qemacs (for quick emacs) is ranked 42nd. 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 Input methods for most (human) languages
Including e.g. Chinese.
Pro Terminal and graphics mode
Supports the terminal mode with 'qemacs -nw' and a graphics mode.
Pro Good documentation and help
- Context sensitive shortcut help on F1.
- Good online documentation.
Pro Comfortable file browser
Easy to open and manage files (dired-mode).
Pro Supports many editing modes besides text
- Hex
- HTML / CSS
- Image
- Audio/video (maybe not the most sought after mode in a text editor, but, well, it's there)
Pro Full UTF-8 support
Including bi-directional writing.
Pro Super lightweight and fast
Pro Emacs like key-bindings
Use your muscle memory if you know Emacs already.
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.