Ubuntu – gedit plugin to highlight all instances of selection

geditplugins

Using gedit 3, I've tried multiple plugins to highlight all instances of the current selection (a la Notepad++):

https://code.google.com/p/smart-highlighting-gedit/

The smart-highlighting will seem to install and let me activate it, but doesn't seem to actually do anything.

The one at github was written for v2. To try to hack it into v3, I've tried:

change .gedit-plugin to just .plugin
edit IAge=2 to read IAge=3

That one still won't load (doesn't appear in prefs->plugins list). Doesn't throw an error, just doesn't load. I also can't find the gedit logs anywhere to see if there's a helpful message (I'm relatively new to Linux). I checked /var/logs/ but there's no gedit.

Can anyone help? I just want the auto-highlighting to work.

Best Answer

You don't need any plugin to highlight all instances of a selection in gedit. Select the text about you are interested in, then just press Ctrl+F (to search all instances of that selected text):

gedit - highlight text

Now, let me give you some explanations about those plugins. First one, smart-highlighting is working like a charm for me. How I made:

First I checked my gedit version (from terminal with gedit --version command) - it's 3.6.2.
Because my gedit version is 3.6.2, I downloaded smart-highlighting-3.0.5.tar.gz.
Finally, I followed the manually installation method.

Second plugin, it's for gedit2.x and finish. It's not enough a simple hack like you tried.

[UPDATE]

Only works if installed to ~/.local/share/gedit/plugins/. More in comments.

gEdit 3

The version of gEdit in Oneiric & above is v3 built using gtk+3 libraries. The plugin folder locations are slightly different than from gEdit v2.

Every plugin needs at least two files.

One file (pluginname.plugin) is to tell gedit:

where the plugin can be found,
what it's called,
a short description,
who is the author, etc.

This file is in the .desktop format.

The second file is the actual code.

Both of these files need to be placed in either:

the system-wide plugins directory /usr/lib/gedit/plugins/, or
in the user plugins directory, which may have to be manually created - ~/.local/share/gedit/plugins/.

Installing Plugins

First create the plugin folder:

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/gedit/plugins

Now create a .plugin file using gedit N.B. these files have the format:

[Plugin]
Loader=python
Module=examplepy
IAge=3
Name=Example py
Description=A Python plugin example
Authors=Jesse van den Kieboom <jesse@icecrew.nl>
Copyright=Copyright © 2006 Jesse van den Kieboom <jesse@icecrew.nl>
Website=http://www.gedit.org

_source

For your v2 plugin you already have a file called project-manager.gedit-plugin so you can rename it:

mv project-manager.gedit-plugin project-manager.plugin

Then edit the plugin file and change the section header to "[Plugin]"

You will now see this in your gedit plugin list.

However for me it threw errors about "import gedit, gtk, gtk.glade".

You need to change the source code to import the gtk+3 variants - called python introspection.

An excellent tutorial for converting from gtk+2 to gtk+3 see

http://python-gtk-3-tutorial.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html

Best Answer

[UPDATE]

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