Mousepad was originally created to bring printing support to Leafpad. Well, since then Leafpad has added printing support, so what’s the diff? Very little. But if you look around enough you will find a few variations on the Leafpad theme. In this article I will show you how to install Mousepad and illustrate it’s use and some of the differences you will find.

Installation

As you can imagine, installation of Mousepad is simple. You will find Mousepad in your distributions’ standard repositories, so all you need to do is:

1. Open up your Add/Remove Software tool (such as Synaptic or Packagekit).
2. Search for “mousepad” (No quotes).
3. Mark mousepad for installation.
4. Click Apply to install.

Once installed you will find Mousepad in your Accessories menu. If not there you can look in the Programming menu (if you have one). If not in the programming menu you can always hit <Alt>F2 and then enter mousepad in the run dialog to start up Mousepad.

Usage

Figure 1

When you start up Mousepad (see Figure 1), as you can imagine, it will look very similar to Leafpad (which, in turn, looks very much like you have a terminal window open). Mousepad borrows directly from Leafpad’s minimalist sensibility. You have a text area and a toolbar – that’s it! But don’t be fooled, Mousepad is a very worthy contender in the text editor arena. This little guy can do just about anything the others can.

• Word wrap.
• Line numbers.
• Auto indent.
• Find/replace.
• Jump to.
• Copy/paste.
• Print.

And, unlike Leafpad, Mousepad has a menu option for “Open Recent”. But as far as differences are concerned – that’s it. So why use Mousepad over Leafpad? That’s a good question. At one point you would have used Mousepad over Leafpad when using the Xfce window manager. And although there may be some tiny benefits to using Mousepad over Leafpad in its native environment, you would be hard pressed to notice a difference.

In the end, the only advantage to using Mousepad over Leafpad is the “Open Recent” menu option. Other than that you won’t be able to tell the difference.

Ultimately, however, you are just using a text editor that is nothing more than a step above a text-based editor. And since most text-based editor offer far more features than do either Leaf or Mouse pad, your best bet is to learn the ins and outs of the text-based editors (I will begin to cover some of these editors very soon!)

Final thoughts

It’s up to you which you prefer. But if you’ve tried Leafpad then you’ve tried Mousepad. But, if you use Xfce, you might just feel a bit more at ease using the editor that was originally created for your window manager of choice.

Features

For a simple text editor, Kate packs in a lot of features:

• MDI, window splitting, and window tabbing.
• Spell check.
• CR/CRLF/LF newline support.
• Encoding support.
• Encoding conversion.
• Regular expression find/replace support.
• Syntax highlighting and bracket matching.
• Code and text folding.
• Infinite undo/redo.
• Block selection.
• Auto indentation.
• Auto completion.
• Shell integration.
• Numerous protocol support (http, ftp, ssh, webdav etc.).
• Internet transparency.
• Plugin support.
• Customizable shortcuts.
• Integrated command line.
• Scriptable (JavaScript).

That’s no short list for a simple text editor. But how does it stand up to other such tools? Is it the text editor you’ve been looking for?

Main window

Figure 1

When you open up Kate (click Accessories > Kate) you will see a two-paned window (see Figure 1). The left pane serves as a “tab navigation”. Instead of files opening in tabs, as they do in Gedit, they open up in a list on the left pane. In order to switch between open files you simply have to click on the name listed in the left pane to go back to that particular file.

One nifty feature of Kate is session saving. Say you have numerous files open for a project and you need to stop working on the for a bit of time. You can save that session and then, when you’re ready to start working again, open that session back up. When you open the session up it will have retained all of the open files for you so you don’t have to go back and open them one at a time.

To do this all you have to do is click Sessions > Save and then give your session a name. To open a session click Sessions > Quick Open and then select your session.

Highlighting

Figure 2

And of course, Kate does Syntax highlighting. Figure 1 shows how Kate highlights the same script I illustrated with Gedit. You can easily change the syntax highlight style by clicking Tools > Highlighting and then select the type you want. The type show is Bash.

Embedded terminal

Figure 3

What would a Linux editor be without a terminal included? Well, Kate sure thinks they would be worthless, because she has one built in. If you click on the Terminal button at the bottom of the window you will open the terminal window (see Figure 3) which is a full featured terminal. Just for fun, I opened up the same script in the terminal for you to compare.

Final thoughts

Kate is a very powerful editor that can do handle just about anything any other editor can. give Kate a try, it just might turn out to be one long-term relationship.

There is not a noticeable difference performance wise considering the program startup time and text loading performance. The Intype text editor uses a tabbed interface to display multiple text documents in the same interface. Plugins – which are called bundles in the editor – are available for various programming languages to add better support in the editor. Support is build in for programming languages like C, PHP, Java and various other scripting languages like HTML, XML or CSS supporting language grammar snippets and additional features.

The project’s website contains downloads for additional bundles that can be added to the text editor. The editor is currently in alpha stage. It can be freely downloaded from the developer’s website. The FAQ states however that the editor will not be free once it is fully released.

Intype might be worth a look for users who use plain text editors for coding purposes. It does not however provide access to powerful new features or commands that other text editors like Notepad++ do not offer.

Pixlr – The online image editor

Pixlr had been developed by a Swedish guy who launched the service with this understated blog post consisting of just:

“So it’s sunday afternoon in Sweden and tomorrow I will let a few know about pixlr. I wonder what they will say about the result of from a years work and thousands of lines of code?”

Fairly non-committal, especially considering the strength of his application. I have no idea if this was a hobby, if he has plans to monetize it or license it, at the moment the idea seems to just be get the word out.

What immediately endeared the service to me was the fact there is no sign-up registration, simply “jump right in” and get started. This is a huge advantage, there is nothing worse then wanting to try a new service but being confronted by yet another registration form.

The application itself is more on the lines of Photoshop express, rather then a complete Photoshop replacement like Aviary is aiming to become. Personally I found it a happy medium between the two, enough functionality without being too basic either.

It also looks pretty darn good, if you’re a fan of the Vista Aero interface. Actually even if you aren’t I think you’ll be hard put to dislike it. Performance wise I would say it’s fantastic, menus are snappy and I could barely tell it was a browser based program.

That said, I will admit I haven’t fully tested it with larger photos, more tasks etc.

The ironic thing I found about using Pixlr is that I immediately wished there was a way I could have the application offline as well as through the browser. It feels a lot slicker and smoother then freeware Paint.NET and would fit well into the Vista desktop, which is a lot more then can be said for most apps.

In fact I think once you have a bit of a poke around you’ll discover quite a few changes which really improve the program.

Changes to the UI:

• The addition of tabs along the bottom of the screen which switch views between normal, preview and HTML. It doesn’t look quite as attractive but it’s certainly more usable
• Toolbar revised and Weblogs menu moved to the top right
• Search through your categories

New Features:

• Video Publishing was possible through a plug-in, but now it has been incorporated into the program.
• Image editing, now you can add 5 more borders to your images and rotate, adjust contrast, tilt and crop. The addition of crop is particularly useful.
• Word Count! Boy I’m sure glad this was included… I would say that out of all these changes it’s the feature I most wanted, even though you could get it through a plugin.
• Support for.gif, Lightbox and other image previewing effects
• Addition of ‘check for updates’ in the help context menu
• Images can now be centred from the properties panel
• Automatic linking to specified terms. (example: I could specify a frequently used word such as gHacks to be auto-linked)

SDK changes

These are quite significant changes, but I think I can foresee some issues coming in the future. The SDK now allows for two new plugin types:

Code can now be executed before or after a blog post is published. Two example have been included with the preview for Twitter and Digg. This means blog posts can now be automatically submitted to Digg or your Twitter stream or a myriad other services. While this is handy it does mean some people will abuse the system.

Digg isn’t about submitting every blog posts you write, it’s about submitting a page that is actually good. That was the whole purpose, filter out the crap. Otherwise how does Digg become different then simply having your blog indexed by Google?

Plugins can also now be created to insert content into your headers or footers plugins can insert content as you publish your blog post.

The beta can be downloaded and installed on computers that run Windows, Linux, Solaris or Mac OS X Intel Aqua. Localized versions are available as well and can be downloaded from the external mirrors that host all localized builds.

A Beta page lists all of the features that have already been implemented in the current Beta of Open Office 3. It divides the changes in New Core Features, like the import filter for Microsoft Office 2007 formats, Core Features that have been introduced in minor releases since the release of Open Office 2.0 and Features that have been released as extensions or complimentary tools.

The most immediately visible change to OpenOffice.org 3.0 is the new “Start Centre”, new fresh-looking icons, and a new zoom control in the status bar. A closer look shows that 3.0 has a myriad of new features. Notable Calc improvements include a new solver component; support for spreadsheet collaboration through workbook sharing; and an increase to 1024 columns per sheet. Writer has an improved notes feature and displays of multiple pages while editing. There are numerous Chart enhancements, and an improved crop feature in Draw and Impress.

Behind the scenes, OpenOffice.org 3.0 will support the upcoming OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 standard, and is capable of opening files created with MS-Office 2007 or MS-Office 2008 for Mac OS X (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.). This is in addition to read and write support for the MS-Office binary file formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc.).

OpenOffice.org 3.0 will be the first version to run on Mac OS X without X11, with the look and feel of any other Aqua application. It introduces partial VBA support to this platform. In addition, OpenOffice.org 3.0 integrates well with the Mac OS X accessibility APIs, and thus offers better accessibility support than many other Mac OS X applications.

The size of the download lies between 145 and 197 Megabytes depending on the operating system.

Some time ago I downloaded a freeware editor just to see what it has to offer and I was really surprised by its capabilities when I finally got to giving it a try. This light-weight yet powerful editor is called Q10 and it’s available as a free download on the website of Baara e-studio. As a portable application fitted into smallish 350 kB with a number of neat features and dark-room nature it beats any competition I’ve heard of. Another nice thing is that it always launches in full-screen and actually doesn’t even have any menu thanks to keyboard shortcuts by which it is controlled. To display these, one must press F1 key. I’m better saying that right away coz it took me a little while to find out.. :)

Now shortly to the features themselves. Notes inside the text, spell checker, alarms, auto corrections, auto completion, auto-save, sound effects, portability.. that’s just the basic outline. All kind of info is displayed in the status bar including words, lines, paragraphs, chars and pages count as well as time and full path to the currently edited file (optional). You can change basically anything in this tiny piece of software since all settings it uses are stored in an *.ini file. These include changing all the fonts, colors, backgrounds, margins, infos displayed on the info bar, etc.

Q10 can be either obtained as a version with installer or a compressed archive according to your taste. An IMPORTANT note about this software would be that you may need to change the line ending format to DOS instead of Unix by pressing Ctrl+P and selecting appropriate item under the “Misc” tab so that your text files wouldn’t be saved with ugly squares in place of line breaks. Also note that Q10 can open recently edited files but if you delete the last edited, you need to press Ctrl+N for a new clean file or else you’d have to change the file format manually by pressing Ctrl+E and selecting the right option again. That’s just a trivial inconvenience though and it’s no big deal. Let’s go nuts typing !!

Puretext is a freeware utility that helps you in this special case. It adds a new windows hot key to your system (Windows + V) which removes all the formatting of the text that is pasted into your editor. You have some options in puretext like changing the hotkey to Shift + V or ALT + V instead of the default one. You are free to change the key that needs to be pressed as well, making it highly flexible.

Another option if selected pastes the converted text automatically into the active window when you press the hotkey. If you do not enable this the text is stripped of the formatting but not pasted into the editor. You are free to play a sound when this is done but I would advise against it. You may also auto run puretext with every windows start by enabling that option in puretext.