[4] Designed as a general-purpose text editor, gedit emphasizes simplicity and ease of use, with a clean and simple GUI, according to the philosophy of the GNOME project.

[5] It includes tools for editing source code and structured text such as markup languages.

[5] It is free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License version 2 or later.

[12] The features of gedit include multi language spell checking via Enchant and a flexible plugin system allowing the addition of new features, for example snippets and integration with external applications including a Python or Bash terminal.

Using a plugin (in gedit-plugins package), gedit can save and load sessions, which are lists of currently open tabs.

[21] Current versions of gedit (3.0+) for Windows are also available through MSYS2 and can be installed via the built-in Pacman package manager.