Mousepad is a graphical text editor written for Xfce, a Linux desktop environment.[7] The program has a small footprint, similar to Leafpad,[7] but has additional features such as plugins, search history and automatic reloading.[8] The name Mousepad is derived from the mouse in Xfce's logo.[9]
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| Original author(s) | Erik Harrison, Benedikt Meurer, Tarot Osuji[1] |
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| Developer(s) | Erik Harrison, Nick Schermer, Benedikt Meurer, Matthew Brush, Gaël Bonithon[1] |
| Initial release | April 17, 2006[2] |
| Stable release | 0.6.1[3] / May 13, 2023 |
| Repository | gitlab |
| Written in | GTK[3] |
| Operating system | Unix-like |
| Platform | x86 64, aarch64, ppc64, i686, ARMhf[4] |
| Included with | Xfce |
| Predecessor | Leafpad |
| Size | 436.2 kB[5] |
| Type | Text editor |
| License | GPL-2.0-or-later[6] |
| Website | docs |
Mousepad was originally written as a fork of an existing text editor, Leafpad,[10] to improve support for printing.[11][12] It was rewritten in December 2012 with version 0.3.0, which replaced the original code with a complete rewrite.[13]
Though written for Linux, Mousepad has been ported to FreeBSD[14] and is also available for macOS via MacPorts,[15] and Microsoft Windows via Cygwin.[16] It is the default text editor for Linux distributions that use Xfce, such as Xubuntu.[17] Kali Linux uses Mousepad as its default text editor, but modifies the code to add a newline at the end of files so that they are POSIX-compliant and do not merge when printing multiple files back-to-back.[18]
Features
In addition to plugin support,[8] Mousepad has features including tabs,[19] copy and paste, Undo/Redo, drag and drop, keyboard shortcuts,[20] printing, UTF-8 support, line numbers, 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.[21]
Dependencies
Compiling Mousepad requires gtksourceview4-4.8.3, which is a library for GTK+ text and visuals, and is used for installing themes.[22] DConf-0.40.0, a dconf package, and dbus-glib-0.112, a GLib tool to interface with D-Bus, 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.[23][24]