gedit
 

Gedit is creating lots of backups of my files with ~ appended to the end of the names. Is there a way to get gedit to put creating backups that look like this ".name.txt~" so that the backup files will be hidden and I wont have a mess of files that can be seen?

Not sure but if you like gedit you might like medit. When I used Gnome I tried for a while to find out how I could stop gedit saving those backups but in the end I gave up :/