You can change most settings from window menu -> Edit -> Preferences. Lot of stuff there is up to your personal preferences (like whether to show line numbers or what color scheme to use), so I won't got into much detail on how I set it up. I think you would want to turn on the Enable automatic indentation from the Editor tab, so that you don't have to indent every line by hand.
You can also enable and disable plugins from Plugins tab. Here I would enable External tools plugin (which allows you to execute scripts and bind them to keyboard shortcuts), if you want to be able to build directly from editor, the way I'm doing it. Additional "official" plugins can be also installed by downloading gedit-plugins package ("sudo apt-get install gedit-plugins" on Ubuntu). From the plugins there I'm currently using only External tools and Code comment (that allows you to comment out whole selection on code in one go).
I also downloaded the Intelligent text completion plugin from ze here: https://github.com/nymanjens/gedit-intelligent-text-completion
You can also disable Toolbar and Statusbar from the window menu -> View if you think they're getting in the way.
And finally, in order to comfortably build from editor, without having to go to terminal, I went to window menu -> Tools -> Manage external tools. Here I added two tools (named them MyBuild and MyRun cause of my abundance of creativity). I bound them to CTRL+B and CTRL+R respectively but you can do whatever you want.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 | #!/bin/bash #MyBuild EHOME=`echo $HOME | sed "s/#/\#/"` DIR=$GEDIT_CURRENT_DOCUMENT_DIR while test "$DIR" != "/"; do for m in build.sh; do #list of possible names for your build scripts if [ -f "${DIR}/${m}" ]; then echo "Using ${m} from ${DIR}" | sed "s#$EHOME#~#" > /dev/stdout pushd "${DIR}" &> /dev/null ./build.sh popd &> /dev/null exit fi done DIR=`dirname "${DIR}"` done echo "No build script found!" > /dev/stderr #!/bin/bash #MyRun EHOME=`echo $HOME | sed "s/#/\#/"` DIR=$GEDIT_CURRENT_DOCUMENT_DIR while test "$DIR" != "/"; do for d in build; do #list of possible names for your build folder if [ -d "${DIR}/${d}" ]; then DIR="${DIR}/${d}" for e in game; do #list of possible names for you executable files if [ -f "${DIR}/${e}" ]; then echo "Executing ${e} from ${DIR}" | sed "s#$EHOME#~#" > /dev/stdout pushd "${DIR}" &> /dev/null chmod +x ${e} ./${e} popd &> /dev/null exit fi done DIR=`dirname "${DIR}"` fi done DIR=`dirname "${DIR}"` done echo "No executable found!" > /dev/stderr |
These are in no way bulletproof scripts (please don't stone me to death for how bad they are) and if you know even little of bash scripting, I would strongly advise you to write something better. Basically what the do is to look from the location of current file to the system root folder and look for build.sh file (in case of MyBuild) or "game" file inside build folder (in case of MyRun) and execute them. I should say, that I changed compiler output file name to game, so that MyRun script works on any project as long as its output is called game. I also set the Save option to All documents and Output option to Display in bottom pane for both MyBuild and MyRun.
I'm planning to play around with few more plugins but for now, this setup is plenty enough for me and I quite like it so far. Although I don't rule out, that I'll have look on other editors as well.