2025-12-17 :: Mid-December News
Misc news for the past month about the gedit text editor, mid-December edition! (Some sections are a bit technical).
(By the way, the "mid-month" news is especially useful for December/January, when one thinks about it ;-) ).
gedit now refuses to load very large files
It was part of the common-bugs, and it is now fixed! New versions of gedit will refuse to load very large files or content read from stdin.
The limit is configurable with the GSettings key:
org.gnome.gedit.preferences.editor max-file-size
By default the limit is set to 200 MB. The setting is not exposed in the Preferences dialog (there are a few other such settings).
There are technically two cases:
- First the file size - if available - is checked. If it exceeds the limit, the error is directly returned without trying to read the content.
- Then the content is read and it is ensured that the maximum number of bytes is not reached. The check here is necessary for reading stdin, for which the file size doesn't exist. And even when the file size information is available, the double-check is necessary to avoid a potential TOC/TOU (time-of-check to time-of-use) problem.
It is planned to improve this and offer to load the content truncated.
Windows improvements
I've fixed some compilation warnings and unit tests failures on MS Windows, and done some packaging work, including contributing to MINGW-packages (part of MSYS2).
Other work in libgedit-gtksourceview
Various work on the completion framework, including some code simplifications.
Plus what can be called "gardening tasks": various code maintenance stuff.
gspell CI for tarballs
AsciiWolf and Jordan Petridis have contributed to gspell to add CI for tarballs. Thanks to them!