Michele Campeotto

This weekend I have installed Ubuntu Dapper Flight 6 on my laptop and found it worked pretty well. Among the nice things, suspend/hibernate/resume work fine and are much faster than on Breezy (apart from a little glitch on resume when connected to AC).

Another nice Dapper thing, coming from the included GNOME 2.14, is the new Text Editor, which now has the enhanced capability to add plugins to the application, and you can write plugins in Python.

As I prefer – for various reasons – plain text over using the big word processors, I have written a simple plugin to help writing Markdown formatted text. The plugin will add an HTML preview in gedit’s bottom panel, allowing you to see how your document will look when rendered. For more info and downloads, refer to the wiki page I created.

Everybody knows that ease of extension is a key to success, so I really hope people start to write cool plugins (the snippets one is great for example) and extend gedit to become more and more powerful. I don’t see it replacing my primary development environment anytime soon, but I was already using it for more document-oriented editing tasks, and it’s great to see it becoming better at every iteration.