How to properly edit system files (as root) in GUI (and CLI) in Gnu/Linux?

System: Linux Mint 18.1 64-bit Cinnamon . ------------- Objective: To define Bash aliases to launch various CLI and GUI text editors while opening a file in root mode from gnome-terminal emulator. --------------------------------------------------------- Progress ----------- For example, the following aliases seem to work as expected: For CLI , in this example I used Nano (official website ): alias sunano='sudo nano' For GUI , in this example I used Xed (Wikipedia article ): alias suxed='sudo xed' They both open a file as root . --------------------------------------------------------- Problem ------------ I have an issue with gksudo in conjunction with sublime-text : alias susubl='gksudo /opt/sublime_text/sublime_text' ***Sometimes*** it works. It just does not do anything most of the time. How do I debug such a thing with inconsistent behavior? It does not output anything. No error message or similar. ------------------ Question ---------- gksudo has been deprecated in Debian and also no longer included in Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic, so let me re-formulate this question to a still valid one: How to properly edit system files (as root) in GUI (and CLI) in Linux? ***Properly*** in this context I define as ***safely*** in case, for instance, a power loss occurs during the file edit, another example could be lost SSH connection, etc.