How can I run gedit with a different configuration

I want to use gedit as a programming IDE and as a regular text editor. Would I be able to make some .desktop file to load a different configuration?

Solution 1:

It doesn't seem to be supported right now, see this upstream bug report.

However, you could create a wrapper for gedit, that sets the specific plugins you want via gconftool-2.

This would look something like:

#!/bin/bash
old_config=$(gconftool-2 --get "/apps/gedit-2/plugins/active-plugins")
gconftool-2 --set --type list --list-type string "/apps/gedit-2/plugins/active-plugins" "[$1]"
gedit
gconftool-2 --set --type list --list-type string "/apps/gedit-2/plugins/active-plugins" "$old_config"

Now save this somewhere as eg. gedit_profile and make it executable:

chmod +x  gedit_profile

To load different profiles, just call it with a comma-separated list of plugins you want to enable, for example:

/path/to/gedit_profile "terminal,colorpicker"

[Of course you then can put this into separate launchers.]