Mint 18.3 Cinnamon 3.6.7

I'm trying to edit the Cinnamon .css file using sudo gedit. It keeps returning the attached and the terminal hangs. Help please and thank you.

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Does this file open with other text editors such as vim?

Are you saying that Gedit, which is the text editor that Mint 18.3 supplies as default, can't open and edit a Cinnamon file?

I tried Sublime which seemed to open the file and save the edit but made no change in the desktop appearance. When I tried Restart I got a message that "gnome-keyring-daemon" was still running, and I had to force a restart. Huh??

Not exactly. gedit is one of my favorites too. However it could be the file is in use or something. Another thing to try is run nemo(the file manager) to the folder where the file is and right click, select open folder as root, now double-click the file.

So why are you manually editing a config file for the desktop? Cinnamon has some great gui config tools.

And let me guess you have it set to login to your DE automatically? this occasionally doesn't unlock the keyring, but it generally shows up later and asks to be unlocked.

The reason I'm messing with this at all is because I'm trying to restore some changes I made to the panel in Mint 18.1 (some text and background colors, transparency,etc.) which 18.3 specifically asked me during the upgrade process "Don't Change?" but then went ahead and changed anyway. Thank you, I think, Mint team.

I seem never to learn. 18.1 was running just fine. I should have left well enough alone. But nooooo, not me )

Well I hope things work out for you.

BTW did you get gedit running? You might have to install a plugin for css files.

And for changes to take place after editing the file, you'll likely have to restart X, I'm not sure how cinnamon gets reconfigured though.

The terminal hangs because gedit is a GUI application. You will not be able to do any more in that terminal window (except ctrl-c) until you close gedit itself. Of course you could run the application in the background by appending a & on the end of the command.

The default editor in Mint (Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce) is xed.

If you're calling a GUI program as root from the command line then the best way to do it is use e.g. gksudo xed filename.

Thanks for the VERY interesting info. In the drop down menu of Mint 18.3 if you type "text editor" it returns Gedit and only Gedit, and xed doesn't even show up in the menu under the Programming category.

I like the sound of Manjaro, don't you?

gksudo gedit

Strange. It looks as if the system may have retained some settings from way back. You can no doubt change that, but if you're thinking of moving to another distro anyway then it probably wouldn't be worth the bother.

Out of interest, what do you mean by "drop-down menu"? If the main panel is on the bottom of the screen, which is the default, then the menu expands upwards from the menu button at the bottom left. Do you have a non-standard set-up there?

It is extremely strange - and incompetent. Why should I have to change anything "back" just because I implemented a recommended upgrade? Mint seems to be going the way of Mozilla. Manjaro on the other hand seems to be much more intelligent.

My menus and calendar drop down because I moved the panel to the top of the screen.

Ah, I see. You should give Manjaro a whirl if that's what you desire.

I am moving to Manjaro but I want to continue using the Cinnamon DE so I will likely encounter the same issue. I ran gksudo xed in the terminal and got the same (or similar) response - see attachment. Obviously, I'm missing something or failing to comprephend something. Advice appreciated.

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When you run gksudo xed, does xed not open in a window on your screen?

Yes, it opens. I then opened usr/share/cinnamon/theme/.css and made the changes I wanted. Clicked save and exited. Then ran alt F2 rt. Nothing changed, nothing happened. The terminal displayed the info in my previous attachment.