Debian – gedit installation size is too large

You could try something like:

list="" ; for pkg in $(apt-cache search ^mate | grep -v -- '-dev'); list="$list $pkg" ; done ; sudo apt-get install $list

Removing a program just because you don't use it shows a misguided sense of priorities. Disk space is cheap. Gedit takes less than 2MB of disk space. Even at SSD RAID-1 prices, that costs less than ½¢. At the minimum wage in my country, it takes less than 2s to earn that much. It'll take you far more than 2 seconds to do this. The gains from removing the package are negligible — only the network and disk bandwidth when the package is installed.

That being said, here's how you can do it.

The cinnamon-desktop-environment package depends on the applications that are officially part of the Cinnamon desktop environment. Gedit is one of them.

If you want to remove Gedit but keep the rest of Cinnamon, mark the dependencies of cinnamon-desktop-environment except gedit as manually installed, then remove cinnamon-desktop-environment. You take the responsibility of adding any component that might be added to Cinnamon in the future. You can use aptitude search to list the packages that Cinnamon depends on.

aptitude unmarkauto $(aptitude -F %p search '~i ~Rcinnamon-desktop-environment !^gedit$')
apt-get remove gedit

Alternatively, you could make a fake gedit package that exists solely to resolve the dependency but doesn't contain the gedit binary. You can use equivs to make such fake packages. Note that some Cinnamon configuration may still believe that Gedit is present and attempt to call the nonexistent binary.