September 18, 2010

How to get the Symbol Browser Plugin to work in Gedit

Ok, so twice I had to research and figure out how I got the symbol browser working in gedit. I started out trying to install the Class Browser. But the ubuntu community suggested that this plugin was no good and to instead use the symbol browser. If you quickly rush and start downloading the symbol browser plugin, you will find that you just downloaded a whole bunch files that need to be compiled. Lucky for us though, you can instead download the binary files for the symbol browser. Go to SourceForge and instead of clicking on “Download Files”, look below under “Browse Files for Gedit Symbol Browser Plugin” and you should see

gedit-symbol-browser-plugin-bin-ubuntu-i386-0.1.tar.gz

If you are using 64 bit, make sure download the 64 bit binary version.

Extract your files and move it over to ~/.gnome2/gedit. You should have the following files…
~/.gnome2/gedit/symbols
~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins/libsymbolbrowser.so
~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins/symbolbrowser.gedit-plugin

A lot of us will now try and open Gedit and enable the plugin. As you try, it will automatically get grayed out. This is because you need the following package.

libgnomeprintui

Once you restart Gedit and enable the plugin, you might realize that it’s still not displaying any class, functions, or variables after you open a file. This is because you need to install exuberant-ctags. After you do this, you should be ready to go.

Let me know if you have any problems.

Comments (10)

  1. Hey there,

    I’m using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, freshly installed this week.

    I have successfully installed the pulgin (it shows up in the list) and the two packages libgnomeprintui & exuberant-ctags (triple check).
    I have also managed to install other plugins from the live.gnome.org website, everything is fine.

    It still get greyed out when I try to enable it. Any suggestions?

    Comment by JC — November 5, 2010 @ 8:07 am

  2. try run gedit on comand line , then open the plugin setting panel. try to active the symbol browser you should get error info from the console

    Comment by hello2u — November 13, 2010 @ 7:59 pm

  3. Thanks for the post. Much appreciated :)

    Comment by sanchan89 — November 17, 2010 @ 6:27 pm

  4. Thank you, its works
    GOOD

    Comment by halim — December 7, 2010 @ 12:27 am

  5. Problem quite the same as JC!!
    ubuntu 10.10, gedit2, libgnomeprintui-2.2, exuberant-ctags well installed.
    But still the plugin is greyed out!!

    any thoughts??

    Comment by bvr — February 8, 2011 @ 10:37 pm

  6. @bvr: Do you have the right version? 64-bit linux needs other binaries.
    The 64-bit binaries for debian can be found here:
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/symbol-browser/files/symbol-browser-bin/gedit-symbol-browser-plugin-bin-ubuntu-AMD64-0.1/

    Try running gedit from the commandline to view the error output when you try to enable the plugin.

    Good luck!!!

    Comment by Paul — February 18, 2011 @ 8:32 am

  7. Thanks, it worked perfectly! At first, I got this error:

    _________________
    ** (gedit:19153): WARNING **: symbolbrowser: /home/hamiltont/.gnome2/gedit/plugins/libsymbolbrowser.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32

    ** (gedit:19153): WARNING **: Could not load plugin module: Symbol Browser

    ** (gedit:19153): WARNING **: Error loading plugin ‘Symbol Browser’
    ^C
    __________________________

    Turns out that I had accidentally downloaded the i386 when I actually had a 64 bit machine ;-) . Once I tried the AMD64 it worked perfectly.

    Comment by Hamy — April 18, 2011 @ 12:19 am

  8. Glad you liked my plugin. While Ubuntu may not be running Gedit 3.0 just yet, it will be soon. The plugin framework for Gedit changes and the symbol browser won’t work anymore. I wrote a new plugin for Gedit 3 to replace it: https://github.com/Quixotix/gedit-source-code-browser

    Comment by MIcah — May 9, 2011 @ 9:52 pm

  9. Thanks heaps!! You saved me hours of fiddling around.

    I really wished distributions included that plugin properly configured by default.

    Cheers

    Comment by Serge Rivest — September 15, 2011 @ 7:39 pm

  10. I managed to get the plugin working but now it seems to have problems dealing with spaces in directories and filenames, and so, although it is enabled and “working” it doesn’t show any symbols at all. Trying to build it from source on Ubuntu but it has been a painful process so far and still no luck…

    Comment by Ricardo Graça — October 10, 2011 @ 9:09 am

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