reStructuredText Plugin

A plugin for GNOME's text editor gedit to render reStructuredText.

Layout Options

Dependencies

• Python: version >= 3.3 (-> use mcepl/reStPlugin for Python 2.x)
• Docutils and Pygments: sudo apt install python3-docutils
• (optional) schedtool: sudo apt install schedtool

Installation

• Choose the right source for your version of gedit from the releases on GitHub. With git you can checkout the corresponding tag (e.g. git checkout gedit-3.8).

  gedit-3.8

  3.8 <= gedit < to 3.10

  gedit-3.10

  gedit >= 3.10 (3.18 has been reported to work fine)

  gedit-3.22

  gedit >= 3.22 (3.22.1 verified on Ubuntu 17.10)

  gedit-3.28

  gedit >= 3.28 (3.28.1 verified on Ubuntu 18.04)

  gedit-3.36

  gedit >= 3.36 (3.36.2 verified on Ubuntu 20.04)

• Put reST.plugin file in gedit's plugins directory. The standard one should be ~/.local/share/gedit/plugins/. Alternatively, the global directory is something like /usr/lib/gedit/plugins/ or /usr/lib/<architecture>-linux-gnu/gedit/plugins/.
• Copy the whole reST folder into the same directory.

You should then obtain something like this:

.../plugins/
        reST.plugin
        reST/
            schemas/
              gschemas.compiled
              org.gnome.gedit.plug...
            __init__.py
            config.py
            restructuredtext.py
            ...

• Syntax highlighting works out-of-the-box with any new version of gedit. (Check the language mode drop-down in the footer bar of the editor window.) For older versions follow the instructions in syntax/README.rst to activate syntax highlighting.

Usage

Activate the plugin via Edit > Preferences > Plugins and check the checkbox next to reStructuredText Preview. Optionally, you can also choose whether you want the preview displayed in the bottom or the side panel.

The plugin is now activated, and you should have a new tab inside the bottom panel named reStructuredText. If you don't see the panel on the bottom of the editor window make it visible via View > Bottom Panel. If you use the side panel operate the drop-down selector on top of it to switch between Documents view and reStructuredText.

If the schedtool command is available, the plugin will use that to lower the priority of the rendering thread.

More Features

Prior versions versions of this plugin had more features (manual reloading with Ctrl+Shift+R, export to HTML, LaTeX and LibreOffice formats). See the July 4, 2014 version of this README.

If you want these features in again please get your hands dirty and make a pull request. The refactored code base of the current version should make this more easy than ever. Your contribution is appreciated!

Contributing

Please run flake8 and, optionally, pylint to ensure your contribution adheres to our coding style.

Please compile the GSettings schema if you make schema changes: (DTD)

glib-compile-schemas reST/schemas/

Resources:

• API docs for gedit plugin development
• GNOME discussion forum for a helpful crowd

Alternatives

If you're not totally happy with this plugin try the following editors for quick and free solutions of editing reStructuredText files:

• rsted (online reStructuredText editor)
• ReText (reStructuredText and MarkDown editor)