How do I disable the start page in gedit?

[sienile]

Title pretty much says it all. I want to disable the start page that opens up every time you open gedit.

To me the page is a bit of a nuisance. Gedit always opens the page, even when I'm opening a file. I'm pretty sure it's part of the reason why gedit takes an extra 5 seconds to boot up. 5 seconds may not seem like much, but it's enough time for me to forget what I was going to type.

[papibe]

Hi sienile.

I've never seen that behaviour on gedit, so I assumed it is a plugin.

This one maybe: reopen-tabs-gedit-plugin (Loads recently opened documents when gedit starts)

Go to:

Edit -> Preferences -> Plugins

and disable it there. Then restart Gedit.

Let us know how it goes.
Regards.

[sienile]

After a fresh re-install of Ubuntu I still have a similar problem. (The start page was a plugin that I installed, but did not show up in the Plugin Preferences tab somehow.)

Now whenever I open a file by clicking it in a file manager (but not when using gedit's open dialog) it opens an extra blank document. It doesn't cause gedit to be slow opening like the start page did, but it's still annoying to have to close all the extra blank docs when I open a series of files.

P.S.: Gedit has absolutely no additional plugins installed. It's the out-of-the-box Ubuntu 12.04 X86_64 installation.

[ads52]

Indeed that is a little odd, I also have a new installation of 12.04 and gedit does not show this behaviour, simply opens quickly with a single 'Untitled Document 1' in place when opened via Dash and when accessing files from a File Manager 2ble click it opens only the requested file. Perhaps disable all Gedit plugins and try again? Then slowly reintroduce the plugins one by one.

Mind you have a look at this thread, particularly posts 6 and 7 which seem to point to a solution:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=120283

Looks like you are not alone .

[sienile]

Thanks, ads52. I had looked everywhere for someone having a similar issue. Guess I just wasn't using the right keywords to find it.

[sienile]

While the steps in the forum posts ads52 pointed me to did not work, they put me in the right direction.

To fix the blank page problem, you must edit /usr/share/applications/gedit.desktop

The line that says:

Exec=gedit %U

Change to

Exec=gedit $1

That was what worked for me, but others have reported success and failure with each of the following:

Exec=gedit $1 < /dev/null
Exec=gedit "$1" < /dev/null
Exec=gedit %u

Note that the last one is a lowercase U instead of the default capital.

I believe the ones containing /dev/null are KDE solutions, mine and the %u are Gnome solutions.

[sienile]

Okay... this is ticking me off. After I reported this as solved, the very next file I opened in gedit caused the blank page to pop back up.

I'm going to tinker with it some more and see what happens.

[ads52]

Thanks for both researching the problem and posting the final solution .

[sienile]

Apparently I was being a bit too hasty with with trying each solution. It seems to take Ubuntu a few seconds more than I thought to update the application database automatically.

After retrying each solution and waiting a full minute after each, the solution that actually worked for me was:

Exec=gedit $1 < /dev/null

Post finally solved.