Jonasfj.dk/Blog
A blog by Jonas Finnemann Jensen


May 19, 2012
TabControl: Plugin for switching tabs in gedit
Filed under: Computer,English,Linux by jonasfj at 4:11 am

Whilst gedit isn’t the fastest, smartest or most fancy editor out there, I often find my self using it. With toolbars hidden and menu bar gone (unity), gedit is a neat little thing. It always works, and whilst it lacks many features compared to vim, the features gedit does offer, never pops up because I accidentally pressed some key.

The one thing about gedit that I do however feel is missing, is the ability to modify shortcuts. For example switching tabs with “Ctrl + Tab” and “Ctrl + Shift + Tab”, and closing tabs with “Ctrl + F4”, feels as natural as browsing the web in Firefox.

Luckily, it’s possible to install plugins for gedit, I recently found a plugin call Control Your Tabs, that allows you to switch tabs with “Ctrl + Tab”. However, it does tab switch in most recently used order, instead of switching tabs by order in tabview.

I had a quick look at the source for Control Your Tabs, which turned out to be slightly complicated. While I could hack the source to fit my needs, it turned out to be faster and simpler to just write my own gedit plugin.
So here it is TabControl, 50 lines of python now hosted at github.

The plugin switches tabs with “Ctrl (+ Shift) + Tab” based on their order in the tabview. And on top of this it allows you to close the current tab using “Ctrl + F4”. You can find files and installation instructions in the github repository.

The plugin is really short and simple, so if  you want a shuffle feature for switch tabs (or whatever), this could be a good place to start. Otherwise I’d definitely recommend taking a look at the gedit plugin documentation.

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