Linux – How to open new terminal in current directory

tell application "Terminal"  
    do script " "  
    activate  
end tell

It seems weird but it takes advantage of an oddity in how Terminal handles incoming "do script" commands; it creates a new window for each one. You could actually replace that with something useful if you want; it'll execute whatever you want just after opening the new window.

Gedit is primarily a text editor and it cannot "open directories" (at least not in the main view). You probably want to set the default directory for the File Browser Pane plugin I guess.

If you start gedit on the command line with

$ gedit .

it seems like the File Browser will take the directory above the directory you gave it (.) as root directory (to overwrite the value from the previous session) and it will give you a warning that . was a directory, not a file (you knew that already). If you do not want to manually select a directory from the tree view you could start it with any directory below the directory you are interested in, so that the directory above the one you specified is the one you were actually interested in.

$ gedit ./a

The default directory is store in a gconf key (setting management of Gnome, roughly analog to the Windows registry). There might be some way to invoke gedit with that key overwritten, but I don't know how to do that. Anyway FTR, the actual key is /apps/gedit-2/plugins/filebrowser/on_load/virtual_root.