Productivity Sauce

While gedit is a versatile text editor as it is, you can extend its functionality by installing third-party plugins and tweak its appearance using themes. There are quite a few plugins and themes floating on the Web, but if you want to take gedit's functionality to a whole new level, look no further than GMate. This package contains an impressive collection of plugins that will likely cover most of your writing and coding needs.

GMate also packs a large selection of themes which will satisfy even the most picky users. Better still, if you're using Ubuntu or any of its derivatives, you can easily install the entire package from the project's PPA. To do this, run the following commands:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-on-rails/ppa && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gedit-gmate

Launch then gedit, choose Edit | Preferences, switch to the Fonts & Colors section, and select the theme you like. Switch then to the Plugins section and enable the desired plugins. Restart gedit to activate the selected plugins.