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]
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]
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]
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]
^"Review – Xubuntu 19.10"(PDF). Full Circle Magazine. November 2019. p. 42. Archived(PDF) from the original on November 29, 2019. Retrieved September 26, 2022.
^"Kali Linux 2022.3". TechSpot. August 10, 2022. Archived from the original on September 25, 2022. Retrieved September 26, 2022.