This is incredibly weird. I don't see "preferences" in any of my gedit menus. I'm running Version 3.8.3. All I want to do is show line numbers, but I can't do that without preferences.
Where the heck are they hiding?
note: I did remove indicator-appmenus because I dislike having the menus detached from the window.
2015 Update: somehow this is being flagged as a dupe of Enable line numbers in gedit which is a little confusing. The solution is the same but the questions are different.
if you are using GNOME 3, you can access the preferences via the top menu.
you should have "activities" on the top left corner of your screen. on the right side of activities, you will have gedit. click on it, and you should see the preferences.
I'm not sure how to get preferences back in your menus, but you can use gsettings to display line numbers. Enter this command into the terminal:
gsettings set org.gnome.gedit.preferences.editor display-line-numbers true
In case you need to change other settings for gedit, you can use this command to find quite a few that are available: (thanks to this answer)
gsettings list-recursively | grep -i gedit
To get the preferences entry back to the edit menu perform the following command in a terminal:
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings overrides '@a{sv} {"Gtk/ShellShowsAppMenu": <int32 0>}'
The problem results from Gnome3 putting the preferences menu entry to the top menu.
Just type Alt+E, then again E when you are in gedit. A new window called "gedit Preferences" should appear.
Faced similar problem...got the preference option in the activities bar in the left hand corner..I am using gedit v3.22.1
You may need to use tweak tool to turn off temporarily some of the common extensions normal people now use to make gnome 3 usable on a desktop. For me, I had to turn off the taskbar and applications menu extensions. Then one can use the method described by Buğra Koç above.
This means the easy switching on and off of line numbers and word wrap in gedit is gone.
If you don't need text highlighting Leafpad is a good replacement for gedit. It looks like the old gedit:
sudo apt-get install leafpad
You can access the preference settings of any app by installing dconf-editor:
Debian derivatives:
sudo apt install dconf-editor
Redhat derivatives:
sudo yum install dconf-editor # for Fedora replace yum with dnf
Then open dconf-editor
dconf-editor &>/dev/null &
Click the search icon and type gedit or follow this path: org/gnome/gedit/preference/editor/display-line-number
Turn off the default value and make the custom value true
Some preferences, such as display line numbers can be activated from the options in the gedit bottom bar(right side).
The preferences are under edit at the bottom of the list.
Try to get the menu-bar back, or if that fails remove it entirely and install a fresh new instance of gedit, mine is 3.10.4, so yours is a bit old!
I know this is an old thread, but I just ran into the same problem. In the end, I figured out that it was because I was still logged in as the superuser. Once I logged out of the terminal and reopened the terminal, everything went back to normal.
Just thought I'd throw that out there in case anyone else hits the same problem.
If you're seeing a # instead of a $ at your command line, this is likely why you can't see your defaults.
