Call me slow, but for whatever reason I never was aware of how cool the snippets plugin for gedit was. It comes as part of the gedit-plugins package in the repositories. It basically works by using a key phrase like “if” or “link” and then hitting tab will insert the code block specified. Placeholders are also included so hitting tab subsequently will move the cursor to those spots. It makes for rather fast coding once you get used to it - a really great productivity tool in a lightweight editor! You can also define your own snippets pretty easily and share them since they get saved as a simple xml file. I just put some I created for Groovy and Grails up on Github.