Graphical editors, such as gedit, can be configured using the preferences menu, and are pretty straightforward.

Enabling tab spacing to be set to 4 spaces and expanding tabs to spaces can be done using the Preferences | Editor tab, as shown in the following screenshot:

Another very useful feature is found on the Preferences | Plugins tab. Here, we can enable the Snippets plugin, which can be used to insert code samples. This is shown in the following screenshot:

For the rest of the book, we will be working on the command line and in vim; feel free to use the editor that you work with best. We have now laid the foundations to create good scripts, and, although whitespace, tabs, and spaces in bash scripts are not significant, a well-laid-out file with consistent spacing is easy to read. When we look at Python later in the book, you will realize that in some languages, the whitespace is significant to the language and it is better to adopt good habits early on.