GNOME – WhyNotWiki

Ethan Caldwell Blog

How to change your default text editor

By default (on my Ubuntu install at least) all text documents are opened with gedit. If you would like to change that, well, you can…

http://tips.webdesign10.com/how-to-change-the-default-text-editor-on-ubuntu-with-nautilus. Retrieved on 2007-05-11 11:18.

Just edit your ~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list (create it if you don’t have one) and add the following text:

[Default Applications]
text/plain=gvim.desktop

Which terminal to use

http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2005/10/configuring-xterm-in-linux.html. Retrieved on 2007-05-11 11:18.

xterm is a terminal which runs in X. In linux when you open xterm, you get a small window with a small – hard to read – font by default. Compared to the ordinary xterm, the gnome-terminal and konsole come loaded with lots of features and are good to view. So why would anybody use an xterm over the other two? The answer lies in its low memory foot print. While konsole takes a whooping 8MB and gnome-terminal over 3MB of memory, you can run xterm under 1MB which makes it blazingly fast even when your computer has only 64MB of RAM.

So I guess if you’re on a system with lots of memory, then there’s no reason to use xterm.

gnome-terminal is pretty good.

http://lwn.net/Articles/88161/. Retrieved on 2007-05-11 11:18.

GNOME’s entry is gnome-terminal. This terminal emulator does all of the stuff that one would expect of an xterm replacement, with a number of useful new goodies:

  • Tabs. A tabbed terminal emulator turns out to be just as useful as a tabbed web browser. If you tend to have a lot of things going on at once and limited desk space, tabs make life much easier.
  • Nice configurability. It is easy to eliminate gnome-terminal’s most obnoxious features (blinking cursor, space-wasting menu bar), tweak fonts and colors, etc. The default colors are also relatively good, at least for people who work in a white-background mode.
  • Multiple profiles. Each tabbed session can have its own fonts, colors, titles, etc. If you tend to keep tabs around for specific purposes (one could, for example, keep a root shell in one tab), you can tweak the presentation to make the current task immediately obvious.

gnome-terminal also has a nice feature in that it makes the pointer fade away as soon as the user starts typing. No more moving the mouse around to get the pointer out of your way. An invisible pointer might seem like a human factors problem in its own right, but the simple fact is that you generally have to move the pointer to find it anyway.