We consider the problem of editing 3D objects and scenes based on open-ended language instructions. The established paradigm to solve this problem is to use a 2D image generator or editor to guide the 3D editing process. However, this is often slow as it requires do update a computationally expensive 3D representations such as a neural radiance field, and to do so by using contradictory guidance from a 2D model which is inherently not multi-view consistent. We thus introduce the Direct Gaussian Editor (DGE), a method that addresses these issues in two ways. First, we modify a given high-quality image editor like InstructPix2Pix to be multi-view consistent. We do so by utilizing a training-free approach which integrates cues from the underlying 3D geometry of the scene. Second, given a multi-view consistent edited sequence of images of the object, we directly and efficiently optimize the 3D object representation, which is based on 3D Gaussian Splatting. Because it does not require to apply edits incrementally and iteratively, DGE is significantly more efficient than existing approaches, and comes with other perks such as allowing selective editing of parts of the scene.