Out of the box gedit is a basic text editor, but it comes equipped with about 12 standard plugins, and another 9 readily available. In addition to this, there are a range of ‘third-party’ plugins developed to do various specific tasks, such as assist you in writing and exporting LaTeX documents! First, get all the basic plugins:
sudo apt-get install gedit-plugins`
and enable them in gedit by going to Edit > Preferences > Plugins, and
checking the ones that you want.
Second, make sure you have all the required dependencies for the actual
\(\LaTeX\) plugin:
1. The plugin is written in Python 2.4 and relies on PyGTK 2.4: sudo apt-get install python-gtk2
2. Ensure that you have rubber installed. It is used for automated document
compiling: sudo apt-get install rubber
3. To use the DVI inverse search you need the Python bindings for D-BUS: sudo apt-get install python-dbus
Third, download the latest version of the \(\LaTeX\) plugin from here,
and extract and copy the contained folder and a file to
~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins. You may have to create gedit/plugins if you
haven’t installed any other plugins yet.
After that, restart gedit and activate the plugin in the settings
dialog as we did with the other plugins.
Now you have an editor with all sorts of handy functions, including inline spell check, code completion, tag, symbol, and character insertion, a file and document browser, and an embedded terminal, as well as tools to automatically create new \(\LaTeX\) files, insert graphics, tables, and matrices, and a fantastic dialog for automatically inserting BibTeX entries. Also, if you’re an R user who creates reports etc. you can use Sweave directly from gedit to embed R code in your LaTeX documents.
All this in a lightweight text editor, nice!
