Graphical editors – gedit and kate

We start with the most basic and simple editors out there. These are the graphical editors! If you are using a GNOME version of any Linux distribution, then you will have the text editor gedit installed by default. On the other hand, if you are using a KDE version of Linux, then you will have the text editor kate installed by default.

DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT

GNOME and KDE are two examples of desktop environments. Each desktop environment implements a different graphical user interface, which is a very fancy way of saying that your desktop will look different!

Anyways, there is really not a lot to discuss on graphical editors. They are pretty intuitive and easy to use. For example, if you want to view a text file with gedit, then you run the gedit command followed by any filename:

elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ gedit /proc/cpuinfo

This will open the gedit graphical editor, and it displays your CPU information.

Figure 1: Opening /proc/cpuinfo with gedit

If you don't have gedit and have kate instead, then you can run:

elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ kate /proc/cpuinfo

Figure 2: Opening /proc/cpuinfo with kate

You can also use the graphical editors to create new files on your system. For example, if you want to create a file named cats.txt in /home/elliot, then you can run the gedit /home/elliot/cats.txt command:

elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ gedit /home/elliot/cats.txt

Figure 3: Creating cats.txt with gedit

Now insert the line "I love cats!" then save and close the file. The file cats.txt now exists in my home directory, and I can view it with the cat command:

elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ pwd
/home/elliot
elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ ls -l cats.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 elliot elliot 13 Feb 2 14:54 cats.txt 
elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ cat cats.txt
I love cats!

Similarly, you can use any other graphical text editor to create files on your system.

OK! That's enough talk about graphical text editors. Let's move on to explore the serious world of non-graphical text editors.