FeatherPad (by Pedram Pourang, a.k.a. Tsu Jan tsujan2000@gmail.com) is a lightweight Qt plain-text editor for Linux. It is independent of any desktop environment and has:
· Drag-and-drop support, including tab detachment and attachment;
· X11 virtual desktop awareness (using tabs on current desktop but opening a new window on another);
· An optionally permanent search-bar with a different search entry for each tab;
· Instant highlighting of found matches when searching;
· A docked window for text replacement;
· Support for showing line numbers and jumping to a specific line;
· Optional selection highlighting;
· Automatic detection of text encoding as far as possible and optional saving with encoding;
· Syntax highlighting for common programming languages;
· Ability to open URLs with appropriate applications;
· Session management;
· Side-pane mode;
· Auto-saving;
· Spell checking with Hunspell;
· Printing;
· Text zooming;
· Appropriate but non-interrupting prompts; and
· Other features that can be found in its settings, on its menus or when it is actually used.
Comments and Reviews
I started using FeatherPad on a low-end Linux machine, and was impressed with its speed, stability, and a feature set with just enough to make it practical as my main text editor. (Search of course, but also syntax highlighting, sorting lines within a file, and quickly switching word-wrap on and off.) It's more stable (and faster!) than Gnome Text Editor and more capable than Gedit. I've since set it as my default on my main Linux system.