[gedit-list] The plugin mentality

[Thomas Biggs <tnbiggs yahoo com>]

By supporting plugins, gedit leaves basic features out of its editor.

It reminds me of shopping for a really cheap car where you have to special order even the most basic things. "You want seat belts? We can have those installed. Windsheld wipers? What are you, some kind of picky troublemaker?"

Now days most text editors have such basic features as block column editing, sorting, and syntax editing for a handful of languages (C++, Java, Python) built-in. With these editors, no matter what machine you log into, you know these features will be there. Not gedit. It reminds me of ancient text editors like Notepad--useful only for very basic tasks. Certainly Linux deserves better than this.

I think that because of plugins, people don't think of putting in these basic features. "You want column editing? We can have that installed!"

I think that mentallity is a big mistake. I use gedit on different machines, not all necessarily configured by me. It would be wonderful if I could count on a few more modern but still basic capabilities built into the default text editor.

    -tom