Where are gedit's preferences?

This is incredibly weird. I don't see "preferences" in any of my gedit menus. I'm running Version 3.8.3. All I want to do is show line numbers, but I can't do that without preferences.

Where the heck are they hiding?

note: I did remove indicator-appmenus because I dislike having the menus detached from the window.

2015 Update: somehow this is being flagged as a dupe of Enable line numbers in gedit which is a little confusing. The solution is the same but the questions are different.

Solution 1:

if you are using GNOME 3, you can access the preferences via the top menu.

you should have "activities" on the top left corner of your screen. on the right side of activities, you will have gedit. click on it, and you should see the preferences.

Solution 2:

I'm not sure how to get preferences back in your menus, but you can use gsettings to display line numbers. Enter this command into the terminal:

gsettings set org.gnome.gedit.preferences.editor display-line-numbers true

In case you need to change other settings for gedit, you can use this command to find quite a few that are available: (thanks to this answer)

gsettings list-recursively | grep -i gedit

Solution 3:

To get the preferences entry back to the edit menu perform the following command in a terminal:

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings overrides '@a{sv} {"Gtk/ShellShowsAppMenu": <int32 0>}'

The problem results from Gnome3 putting the preferences menu entry to the top menu.

Solution 4:

Just type Alt+E, then again E when you are in gedit. A new window called "gedit Preferences" should appear.