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The default Gedit text editor on GNOME has this bug. The alternatives, including Mousepad, don't have auto-completion and/or don't support visualising just trailing spaces in text (e.g., both Mousepad and Geany have all-or-nothing visualisation for whitespace, but not for trailing spaces only).

I'm looking for a (preferably native GTK3) text editor that has these two features (like Gedit) but I don't want to install "heavyweights" like Atom/Sublime, nor do I want to pull in a lot of extraneous dependencies, as when installing Kwrite or Kate in a non-Qt, mostly pure-GTK environment such as GNOME.

Is there any such editor?

I did find CodeEditor (spun off from Qt Creator) but it too doesn't seem to have general (plain text) auto-completion.

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  • I already went through some material on that link before posting here, but didn't find anything useful. Also, I don't really want to pull in KDE dependencies. Anyway, both Geany and Mousepad have the line-ending option, but it always shows all line endings, not just trailing spaces, which makes the display rather crowded and doesn't clearly mark any trailing space there may actually be. The first part (crowded display) is also true of the option to show all whitespace.
    – Saurav Sengupta
    Jul 28, 2017 at 18:53

1 Answer 1

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I think CudaText is not heavy weight, it needs Python 3 installed, and needs plugin "Complete from text" to auto-complete (Ctrl+Space) from typed text.

Unprinted chars: it can show by options:

  • spaces/tabs,
  • end of line arrow,
  • ends details (CRLF, CR, LF).

I don't know about editor which can show unprinted only for trailing spaces (not for other spaces).

GTK2 build.

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  • Thanks. It seems worth a try, but I couldn't find any RPMs for it (Fedora 26). There are .deb packages, though. I'll try it later if I have the time to try on Debian/Ubuntu or to compile it myself. Aug 1, 2017 at 16:16
  • Good to download .xz pack, and unpack it via xz program.
    – Cud2
    Aug 2, 2017 at 7:05
  • I just saw that and downloaded it. Good to see that it's already in executable form; nothing to compile. :) It doesn't have trailing spaces, but it's really good at what it does do and have. It has its few quirks, like having the Python library version hard-coded, which I had to change, but nothing that can't be worked around. I've already downloaded a few plugins, including one for auto-completion, though I do wish it could auto-complete without requiring a hotkey (Ctrl+Space). All in all, this is an excellent editor; all of them just seem to stop just short of trailing spaces. :( Aug 2, 2017 at 7:20
  • Anyway, thanks a lot for pointing out this editor. I tried to up-vote your answer but I don't have enough "reputation". Aug 2, 2017 at 7:21
  • I raised an issue at GitHub, and the developers have promptly added trailing-spaces. So, at least for now, job done! Aug 3, 2017 at 8:21

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