When I open gedit from terminal, I am unable to use terminal for anything else until I close gedit. Why? [duplicate]

Solution 1:

Why does this happen?

When you just run:

 gedit filename

it runs the process in foreground. To send it to the background and continue using terminal, use:

gedit filename &

Note that this (and of course the one above) will run gedit as a sub-process of your terminal, so when you exit the terminal it will also exit gedit.

So to run it 'gracefully', use:

nohup gedit >/dev/null &

nohup will run gedit detached from terminal and hence it is immune to hangups. >/dev/null redirects the stdout to a special location dev/null, thereby preventing the creation of a nohup.out file.

See man nohup and this question for more information.