Programming Tutorials

Installing gedit for python programming in Linux

By: Zed A. Shaw  

1. Go to http://projects.gnome.org/gedit/ with your browser, get the gedit text editor, and install it.
2. Make sure you can get to gedit easily by putting it in your window manager’s menu.
       (a) Run gedit so we can fix some stupid defaults it has.
       (b) Open Preferences select the Editor tab.
       (c) Change Tab width: to 4.
       (d) Select (make sure a check mark is in) Insert spaces instead of tabs.
       (e) Turn on “Automatic indentation” as well.
       (f) Open the View tab turn on “Display line numbers”.
3. Find your “Terminal” program. It could be called GNOME Terminal, Konsole, or xterm.
4. Put your Terminal in your Dock as well.
5. Run your Terminal program. It won’t look like much.
6. In your Terminal program, run python. You run things in Terminal by just typing their name and hitting RETURN. a. If you run python and it’s not there, install it. Make sure you install Python 2 not Python 3.
7. Hit CTRL-D (^D) and get out of python.
8. You should be back at a prompt similar to what you had before you typed python. If not find out why.
9. Learn how to make a directory in the Terminal. Search online for help.
10. Learn how to change into a directory in the Terminal. Again search online.
11. Use your editor to create a file in this directory. Typically you will make the file, “Save” or “Save As..”, and pick this directory.
12. Go back to Terminal using just the keyboard to switch windows. Look it up if you can’t figure it out.
13. Back in Terminal see if you can list the directory to see your newly created file. Search online for how to list a directory.

[~]$ python
Python 2.6.5 (r265:79063, Apr 1 2010, 05:28:39)
[GCC 4.4.3 20100316 (prerelease)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>
[~]$ mkdir mystuff
[~]$ cd mystuff
# ... Use gedit here to edit test.txt ...
[mystuff]$ ls
test.txt
[mystuff]$

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