gedit FAQ

Tabs

Why not use Ctrl+PgUp/PgDown to switch among tabs? It's what gnome-terminal/Epiphany/Firefox do... What about Ctrl+Tab?

Use Ctrl+Alt+PgUp/PgDown to switch tabs. Ctrl+Tab is used to switch focus and it's fundamental for accessibility, so it isn't available. Ctrl+PgUp/PgDown is used by GtkTextView (the text display widget of GTK which gedit uses) to move to the start/end of the current paragraph. This whole behavior is implemented by default by GtkNotebook.

You can install this plugin as a solution.

gedit is very slow and/or crashes when opening files with very long lines. Can you fix it?

When designing GtkTextView (the text display widget of GTK which gedit uses) the developers had to make a design decision: trading off bad performance and memory use on corner cases like very long lines in exchange for better performance in search operations and full support for UTF-8 text. This is a known limitation of GtkTextView and cannot be fixed easily. On top of that the Pango library seems to use a lot of CPU drawing such long lines. Crashes with long lines are usually due to out-of-memory conditions, but if that's not the case then we would like to know about it.

See this GTK issue.

Is it possible to hide the tabs and just use the side panel document list?

Yes, there is a gsetting for that:

$ gsettings set org.gnome.gedit.preferences.ui show-tabs-mode 'never'

To know the possible values:

$ gsettings range org.gnome.gedit.preferences.ui show-tabs-mode