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# Enable Auto Save Feature in Gedit
- URL: https://itsfoss.com/how-to-enable-auto-save-feature-in-gedit/
- Published: 2012-08-20T23:00:47.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T05:02:00.000Z
- Description: Keep forgetting to press Ctrl+S for saving your documents? Take advantage of the autosave feature in Gedit.
- Author: Abhishek Prakash
- Tags: Ubuntu

[Gedit](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gedit?ref=itsfoss.com), the default text editor in [Ubuntu](https://ubuntu.com/?ref=itsfoss.com) and some [other Linux distributions](https://itsfoss.com/what-is-linux/) is a powerful, lightweight text editor. It comes witha number offeatures that makes Notepad (of Windows) a hundred years older. Plenty of plugins are available to further enhance its ability according to user requirement.

Gedit also has an autosave feature which is not enabled by default. It comes handy when you are editing a document and want to save your work periodically.

The autosave feature does not work on new unsaved documents but if you are editing an existing document (which has been saved at least once before), your document will be automatically saved after a certain period.

🚧

This autosave feature only works with a previously saved file. It won't work if you have created a new file

There are two ways you can enable the autosave feature in Gedit, the GUI way and the command line way. I’ll show both methods to you.

## Method 1: The GUI Way

For the GUI mode, open Gedit and go to Menu->Preferences. 

![Access preferences in Gedit](https://itsfoss.com/content/images/2025/11/access-preference-gedit-1.png)

Step 1: Access preferences

Under the Editor tab, check the "Autosave files" option. You can also change the autosave interval here. The default autosave interval is 10 minutes.

![Enable autosave feature in Gedit](https://itsfoss.com/content/images/2025/11/enable-autosave-gedit-1.webp)

Step 2: Under the Editor tab, enable autosave option

## Method 2: The command line way

If you prefer command line over GUI, you can make Gedit automatically save your documents via terminal as well. 

Open a terminal and use the following command to enable autosave in Gedit:

```
gsettings set org.gnome.gedit.preferences.editor auto-save true
```

To set or change the autosave interval, use the following command in terminal:

```
gsettings set org.gnome.gedit.preferences.editor auto-save-interval n
```

Where **n** represents number of minutes.

## Get more out of Gedit

There are many [more Gedit tweaks that you may want to explore](https://itsfoss.com/gedit-tweaks/).

[10 Tweaks to Supercharge Gedit as Code EditorGedit is a good text editor. Turn it into a good code editor with these tips, tricks and tweaks.![](https://itsfoss.com/content/images/icon/android-chrome-512x512-39.png)It's FOSSAbhishek Prakash![](https://itsfoss.com/content/images/thumbnail/tweaks-to-supercharge-gedit-editor.png)](https://itsfoss.com/gedit-tweaks/)

I hope this quick helped you t enable the autosave feature in Gedit text editor. Cheers :)