Mousepad is a graphical text editor written for Xfce, a Linux

desktop environment In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a graphica ...

. The program has a small

footprint Footprints are the impressions or images left behind by a person walking or running. Hoofprints and pawprints are those left by animals with hooves or paws rather than feet, while "shoeprints" is the specific term for prints made by shoes. They ...

, similar to Leafpad, but has additional features such as plugins, search history and automatic reloading. The name Mousepad is derived from the mouse in Xfce's logo. Mousepad was originally written as a fork of an existing text editor,

Leafpad Leafpad is a free and open-source graphical text editor for Linux, BSD, and Maemo that is similar to the Microsoft Windows program Notepad. Created with the focus of being a lightweight text editor with minimal dependencies, it is designe ...

, to improve support for printing. It was rewritten in December 2012 with version 0.3.0, which replaced the original code with a complete rewrite. Though written for Linux, Mousepad is has been ported to

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

and is also available for

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

via

MacPorts MacPorts, formerly DarwinPorts, is a package manager for macOS and Darwin. It is an open-source software project that aims to simplify the installation of other open source software. It's similar in function to Fink and the BSD ports collections ...

, and

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

via

Cygwin Cygwin ( ) is a POSIX-compatible programming and runtime environment that runs natively on Microsoft Windows. Under Cygwin, source code designed for Unix-like operating systems may be compiled with minimal modification and executed. The Cygwin in ...

. It is the default text editor for

Linux distribution A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

s that use Xfce, such as

Xubuntu Xubuntu () is a Canonical Ltd.–recognized, community-maintained derivative of the Ubuntu operating system. The name ''Xubuntu'' is a portmanteau of ''Xfce'' and ''Ubuntu'', as it uses the Xfce desktop environment, instead of Ubuntu's Unity a ...

Kali Linux Kali Linux is a Debian-derived Linux distribution designed for digital forensics and penetration testing. It is maintained and funded by Offensive Security. Kali Linux has around 600 penetration-testing programs (tools), including Armitage (a gr ...

uses Mousepad as its default text editor, but modifies the code to add a

newline Newline (frequently called line ending, end of line (EOL), next line (NEL) or line break) is a control character or sequence of control characters in character encoding specifications such as ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode, etc. This character, or a ...

at the end of files so that they are

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming interf ...

-compliant and do not merge when printing multiple files back-to-back.

Features

In addition to plugin support, Mousepad has features including tabs, copy and paste, Undo/Redo, drag and drop, keyboard shortcuts, printing,

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-width encoding, variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit'' ...

support,

line number In computing, a line number is a method used to specify a particular sequence of characters in a text file. The most common method of assigning numbers to lines is to assign every line a unique number, starting at 1 for the first line, and increm ...

s, searching capabilities (with a replace option), font selection, word wrap, automatic and multi-line indent, and both auto character coding detection and manual codeset options.

Dependencies

Compiling Mousepad requires gtksourceview4-4.8.3, which is a library for GTK+ text and visuals, and is used for installing themes. DConf-0.40.0, a dconf package, and dbus-glib-0.112, a

GLib GLib is a bundle of three (formerly five) low-level system libraries written in C and developed mainly by GNOME. GLib's code was separated from GTK, so it can be used by software other than GNOME and has been developed in parallel ever sinc ...

tool to interface with

D-Bus In computing, D-Bus (short for "Desktop Bus") is a message-oriented middleware mechanism that allows communication between multiple processes running concurrently on the same machine. D-Bus was developed as part of the freedesktop.org project, ...

, are both optional dependencies, along with gspell, a spell-checker, and libxfce4ui, which may be used to display a widget in the XFCE desktop environment.

References

{{reflist Free software projects Free text editors Text editors that use GTK Linux text editors Xfce