Why did launching gedit suddenly get slow?

setup:

ubuntu 20.04.3, updated daily

background:

For years, I have launched gedit from the terminal. Frequently. Without issue.

problem:

As of a few weeks ago, on a laptop and two desktops of varying horsepower (all running 20.04.3 and all updated roughly daily), gedit started taking around a minute to load. Sometimes minutes.

Ummmm... Anyone know what is going on? Fix?

Solution 1:

Sometimes, application configuration data may get messed up and this may have adverse effects on application startup. For example, they may contain some references to network resources that are no longer available.

The gedit application seems to have three places that keep some configuration and application data:

1. The $HOME/.config/gedit directory contains some application configuration data files, like accelerator keys, page and print setup info, and tools (scripts) called by gedit.

2. The $HOME/.local/share/gedit/ directory contains the gedit-metadata.xml file which keeps information about files opened by gedit.

3. “dconf database” that can accessed by running dconf-editor.

I presume, the culprit is the gedit-metadata.xml file. Close all open gedit windows and rename this file. Then try to restart gedit. If this does not work, please look for other files under the $HOME/.local/share/gedit/ directory and try to rename them one by one. Some files in this directory seem to have been deprecated, so the file modification date may be a clue here.

If this doesn’t solve your problem, you may similarly try to rename the contents of the $HOME/.config/gedit directory.

If this still doesn’t solve your problem, you can start dconf-editor, navigate to branch “ / org / gnome / gedit ” and try to reset configuration values to their defaults.

Another place that I would look at would be to disable (again one by one) the gedit plugins: Select Preferences in gedit and go to the Plugins tab. From there, you can disable all the plugins and then enable them one by one by quitting gedit and restarting it each time.