I'm trying to use gsettings to change some of my Gedit settings (Ubuntu 20.04), but my changes seem to be ignored by Gedit. For example, when I change the tab width through
gsettings set org.gnome.gedit.preferences.editor tabs-size 4
my new tab width does show up in
gsettings list-recursively | grep gedit
but when I open anything in Gedit, it's still using the default tab width of 8.
In this example case this isn't much of a problem, as I can change the tab width from the Gedit GUI as well, but other settings, such as right margin position, don't seem to be in the Gedit Preferences menu.
When I tried to sudo the gsettings command I got this error:
(process:4742): dconf-WARNING **: 08:03:40.804: failed to commit changes to dconf: Error spawning command line “dbus-launch --autolaunch=0d66e8250a634e9d8ee4675ca3d977fa --binary-syntax --close-stderr”: Child process exited with code 1
So what would be the correct way to use gsettings here?
Alright, after a good bit of additional searching I found this:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/491217/how-change-gedit-preferences-in-xfce-xubuntu#491296
So apparently (at least part of) my problem is that I'm using the Xfce desktop (I'm usually working over a VNC connection). I'm not sure exactly why/how this causes Gedit to ignore settings changed through gsettings, but installing dconf-editor and changing Gedit's settings there did the trick for me.