gksu hasn't been updated since 2009 and is not recommended any more. In fact, Ubuntu no longer ships with gksu by default (though it may be installed for many of you, because some apps still depend on it) and it may even be completely removed at some point.

The recommended replacement for gksu is pkexec. Applications like Synaptic, Ubuntu Software Center, Software & Updates and others use it for some time but what if you want to use pkexec with applications like Gedit or Nautilus?

By default, you can't because pkexec can't run graphical applications without having a PolicyKit file installed in /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/ for the app you're trying to run as root, and Ubuntu doesn't ship with PolicyKit files for Nautilus or Gedit.

Seif has released Gedit Dash 0.1, a plugin for Gedit that uses Zeitgeist to display recently or most used items in new Gedit tabs. You can search both recently and most used items and also, the plugin generates previews which "try to jump directly to some code or text from your work".

WebUpd8 reader Lu Wang sent us an email about a beautiful (and very popular) color theme for various applications called "Solarized".

Solarized comes with both light and dark colorschemes and what makes it so special is that the contrast is "low in lightness but the colors are still well distinguishable due to the different hue values used" says Lu Wang. But that's of not all. Check out the Solarized homepage for a lot more info and screenshots.

Gedit Collaboration is a really interesting plugin that provides collaborative editing meaning two or more people can work on the same files, create new files and folders and so on. The plugin allows you to collaborate both with other Gedit and Gobby users.

Check out this video created by jessevdk (the Gedit Collaboration plugin developer):

Meld is a great visual diff and merge tool but it can only be used for that and is not suitable for coding. On the other hand, Gedit is a great text editor but it doesn't come with a tool for comparing files. Wouldn't it be great if you could integrate Meld into Gedit? Here is how to do it.

Clientside is a Gedit plugin for those who work with CSS and Javascrip which can be used to minify and format/beautify Javascript and CSS. Further more, the plugin also includes jsLint and an option to Gzip the current file.