gedit

gedit is the general-purpose text editor long associated with the GNOME desktop. It opens files in tabs, highlights syntax for programming and markup languages through GtkSourceView, and covers the everyday details expected of an editor: line numbers, bracket matching, configurable indentation, character-encoding selection, search and replace with regular expressions, and go-to-line.

Its feature set is deliberately modest and grows through plugins. Several ship with the application and only need switching on: a side-panel file browser, a snippets system, a document statistics panel, spell checking, an external-tools plugin that pipes the current document through a shell command, and an embedded terminal. Further plugins are installed separately.

gedit was the default GNOME text editor for many years before that role passed to a newer application, and it is now developed as a project of its own. It suits configuration files, notes and short scripts more than it suits large codebases.