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leafpad: a graphical text editor that starts really fast

September 27th, 2009 edited by Vicho

Article submitted by Emmanuel Kasper. Guess what? We still need you to submit good articles about software you like!

Leafpad in actionSometimes you know you just need to change a single line or a only a few things in a file, but for sure you don’t need syntax highlighting, Gnome VFS integration, or a plugin manager. Then you can spare a few seconds and start leafpad, instead of the usual Gedit/Kedit. Leafpad is is a very simple GTK editor, who can just do search/replace, line numbering and, yes, you can change the default font. Actually, as the result of creeping featurism, printing was added to Leafpad in version 0.8

Leafpad starts always in less that a second, in contrast to 3-4 seconds for gedit on my computer. And for just removing a single line, it makes a difference.

Since leafpad has an installed size of 672k, giving it a try will surely not clutter your hard drive.

Leafpad has been in Debian since at least Etch, and in Ubuntu since Dapper Drake.

Posted in Debian |

6 Responses

  1. Maxim G. Ivanov Says:

    Nice little text editor.
    But I faced such the problem. If gtk it set to use emacs-like bindings, the default leafpad bindings do not work.

  2. Cornell Gonschior Says:

    Thanks for the presentation!

    For me nano does the trick, when I don’t want to start emacs for deleting or editing a single line.

  3. Karl Says:

    Kate starts fast - how would leafpad be better for a gui text editor?

  4. tsakf Says:

    This article has been added to the library.

    Http://fosslib.tsakf.net/record/259

  5. H3g3m0n Says:

    gedit starts in under a second for me too. Although I have a SSD (Vertex).

    If your looking for a fast text editor with some features for programmers (syntax hiliting, etc…), try ‘nedit’. It’s not GTK (or at least not gtk2 based) so it’s got a bit less overhead. Starts as fast as leafpad for me (but once again SSD here).

    mousepad is also another choice if your looking for something similar to notepad.exe

    If you want a full but lite IDE then I recommend geany. (also starts as fast as leafpad, I guess if you want a fast text editor, buy a $300 harddrive ☺)

  6. lightweight Says:

    What you say if i say: MousePad is faster? Why not vim in urxvt(c) - powerfull, very fast and less ram usage? ;)