This is the third installment in a series of blog posts that will cover GUI text editors in Linux. Previously covered were,

• KDevelop
• Geany
• Gedit
• More coming soon

For those of you that know what Mousepad is, you’re probably staring at your screen in disbelief. I mean, you’re wondering what Mousepad is doing here in a GUI editor review. It just doesn’t make sense. Well, for those of you that don’t know, Mousepad is a Windows Notepad clone for Linux. That’s right. Windows Notepad. So, what was I thinking?

Well, many beginner programmers are taught to use Windows Notepad because, “you learn more.” Whether this is true or not, I don’t know. But the thinking behind these people’s choice of editor is that you learn more without code completion, code folding, syntax highlighting, and all of those things that modern GUI editors have.

Should a developer using Windows Notepad move to Linux, Mousepad would be the ideal choice for editor, seeing as how Windows Notepad doesn’t understand UNIX line endings so it would be kinda pointless to run it via WINE on a UNIX-based operating system.

Okay, enough of the chatter, time to actually talk about Mousepad. What does it look like?

Yes. That’s it. It does everything Windows Notepad is supposed to do, but Mousepad does it right. So, why would you want to use Mousepad? Maybe you’re really minimalist, but are scared of the terminal (not likely). Mousepad is really good for those that are familiar with Notepad and don’t really want to move to a totally different editor.

That brings us to the close of a totally pointless review of a silly little text editor.