Hi,

I use gedit for a lot of text editing (code and actual text documents). It's strength is that it's simple, it's just a text editor.

But after a recent update gedit has adopted an annoying behavior: If I start gedit from the command line in one workspace, and gedit is already running in another workspace, the new gedit document appears as a new tab in the other workspace's gedit window.

On one machine this bounces me to the other workspace, and on another similar machine this actually pulls the gedit window from the other workspace to the current workspace. Neither behavior is desirable.

My distro is gentoo and my desktop is xfce. It's possible that this is an xfce problem and not a gedit problem, but gedit is the only application that seems to act this way. Although, I did try rolling back to an older version of gedit, and the problem persisted. My guess is that there's a way to customize this behavior in a configuration file, but the gedit development site is pretty sparse on this kind of advice.

I have done a lot of searching on this problem, and I did find this thread from earlier this summer where an ubuntu user had a similar problem with kate (which is a fork off gedit)

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1334...file-is-called

However, the problem was never resolved. If anyone has any ideas, I would be extremely grateful.

Try
or
or both options at once.

See What does it mean to run gedit in standalone mode?

...and bloated beyond compare.
Srsly if you just want a simple (GUI) text editor, try leafpad, mousepad, featherpad, or geany instead.
Chances are, the "annoying" behaviour will also go away with that.

shruggy, those options open a new gedit window every time. That's really handy at times, but it's also useful to be able to have different documents in the same window. The change here is that gedit is now attaching to windows in other workspaces.

ondoho, that certainly true with respect to the gedit code. Alas, this issue is likely the developers over developing the 'features'. However, I have tried out a few other editors. leafpad doesn't have syntax highlighting (which is great for coding). geany seems actually more feature rich than gedit, for example auto completion and auto indent. I know a lot of coders really like that, but it always feels like someone's trying to type over me, hence my migration to more simplistic editors (although again I think you're right, the backend of gedit is probably pretty bloated).

I will add SciTE to ondoho’s list. Has syntax highlighting, good documentation of its feature configuration, runs in both Linux and Windows. I was pleasantly surprised to learn of that last when I migrated to Linux…did not have to learn a new editor.
Not sure of the bloat factor, but has always performed well for me…

mousepad has syntax highlighting, but not much more.

SciTE also has auto completion and auto indent out of the box, but they are both easy to turn off…

I’m one who likes them. Auto complete prompts me when I reuse a data name which helps me avoid typos. I coded for years using plain text editors and wish I had a dollar for each hour I spent debugging typos…