2026-01-16 :: gedit 49.0 released
gedit 49.0 has been released! Here are the highlights since version 48.0 which dates back from September 2024. (Some sections are a bit technical).
File loading and saving enhancements
A lot of work went into this area. It's mostly under-the-scene changes where there was a lot of dusty code. It's not entirely finished, but there are already user-visible enhancements:
- Loading a big file is now much faster.
- gedit now refuses to load very big files, with a configurable limit (more details).
Improved preferences
There is now a "Reset All..." button in the Preferences dialog. And it is now possible to configure the default language used by the spell-checker.
Python plugins removal
Initially due to an external factor, plugins implemented in Python were no longer supported.
During some time a previous version of gedit was packaged in Flathub in a way that still enabled Python plugins, but it is no longer the case.
Even though the problem is fixable, having some plugins in Python meant to deal with a multi-language project, which is much harder to maintain for a single individual. So for now it's preferable to keep only the C language.
So the bad news is that Python plugins support has not been re-enabled in this version, not even for third-party plugins.
Summary of changes for plugins
The following plugins have been removed:
- Bracket Completion
- Character Map
- Color Picker
- Embedded Terminal
- Join/Split Lines
- Multi Edit
- Session Saver
Only Python plugins have been removed, the C plugins have been kept. The Code Comment plugin which was written in Python has been rewritten in C, so it has not disappeared. And it is planned and desired to bring back some of the removed plugins.
Summary of other news
- Lots of code refactorings have been achieved in the gedit core and in libgedit-gtksourceview.
- A better support for Windows.
- Web presence at gedit-text-editor.org: new domain name and several iterations on the design.
- A half-dozen Gedit Development Guidelines documents have been written.
Wrapping-up statistics for 2025
The total number of commits in gedit and gedit-related git repositories in 2025 is: 884. More precisely:
138 enter-tex 310 gedit 21 gedit-plugins 10 gspell 4 libgedit-amtk 41 libgedit-gfls 290 libgedit-gtksourceview 70 libgedit-tepl
It counts all contributions, translation updates included.
The list contains two apps, gedit and Enter TeX. The rest are shared libraries (re-usable code available to create other text editors).
If you do a comparison with the numbers for 2024, you'll see that there are fewer commits, the only module with more commits is libgedit-gtksourceview. But 2025 was a good year nevertheless!
For future versions: superset of the subset
With Python plugins removed, the new gedit version is a subset of the previous version, when comparing approximately the list of features. In the future, we plan to have a superset of the subset. That is, to bring in new features and try hard to not remove any more functionality.
In fact, we have reached a point where we are no longer interested to remove any more features from gedit. So the good news is that gedit will normally be incrementally improved from now on without major regressions. We really hope there won't be any new bad surprises due to external factors!
Side note: this "superset of the subset" resembles the evolution of C++, but in the reverse order. Modern C++ will be a subset of the superset to have a language in practice (but not in theory) as safe as Rust (it works with compiler flags to disable the unsafe parts).
Onward to 2026
Since some plugins have been removed, this makes gedit a less advanced text editor. It has become a little less suitable for heavy programming workloads, but for that there are lots of alternatives.
Instead, gedit could become a text editor of choice for newcomers in the computing science field (students and self-learners). It can be a great tool for markup languages too. It can be your daily companion for quite a while, until your needs evolve for something more complete at your workplace. Or it can be that you prefer its simplicity and its not-going-in-the-way default setup, plus the fact that it launches quickly. In short, there are a lot of reasons to still love gedit ❤️ !
If you have any feedback, even for a small thing, I would like to hear from you :) ! The best places are on GNOME Discourse, or GitLab for more actionable tasks (see the Getting in Touch section).