2024-05-24 :: gedit 47 released and packaged
gedit 47 has been released and packaged recently.
What's new
The change of icons and logo was already explained.
Dark GTK theme support - some progress
There is some progress to better support the dark GTK theme variant. On Linux
you can use the Dconf Editor
application or the gsettings command in a terminal to change
gedit to use the dark theme:
$ gsettings get org.gnome.gedit.preferences.ui theme-variant 'light' $ gsettings set org.gnome.gedit.preferences.ui theme-variant "'dark'" # To reset to the default value: $ gsettings reset org.gnome.gedit.preferences.ui theme-variant
Some more work is necessary to finish this feature. It is planned to add a 'system' setting, to follow the desktop config. To adapt the Preferences dialog. And to avoid showing bugs with color schemes that don't support dark GTK themes (classic and tango), or to fix those color schemes (but since they inherit colors from the GTK theme, it is currently expected that these colors come from a light theme).
For plugin developers: improved API documentation
The main classes of gedit are now much better documented.
Translations temporarily disabled
Unfortunately, the translations (or localization, l10n) is temporarily disabled. So gedit is available in English only. (You can still write documents in any language thanks to the Unicode support, of course).
This is because the Gedit Technology modules that are hosted on GitHub need something else than l10n.gnome.org.
Work is being done to address this issue. One translation platform has already been tested but was not really satisfactory, so another platform is currently being tested at the time of writing this.
Refactoring and making more code re-usable, as always
Code refactoring is necessary for gedit. Cleaner code permits to better see bugs, to fix them and (hopefully) prevent them from re-appearing in the future.
Packaging work
gedit is available on the Microsoft Store. It is a way to finance the project, so every purchase helps.
For Linux, the latest gedit is available on Flathub. It finally has the Verified badge, and the Flatpak is now directly updated by the upstream developers.
Conclusion
Contrarily to what is sometimes expected from a software release, this is unfortunately not the best gedit release ever because of the transition for the translation platform. gedit 48 will be a better version in that regard.
We wanted to release a new version instead of waiting more, because we prefer more iterations instead of bigger releases. For a project like gedit, it's sometimes a bit a rocky road to drive the project further. On the brighter side, gedit should be more robust overall (the code has seen some bug fixes and many small code improvements under the hood).
This article was written by Sébastien Wilmet, currently the main developer behind gedit.