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FeatherPad is a new text editor that was first introduced in the Lubuntu 18.10 release on 18 October, 2018.

In Lubuntu 18.04 LTS and earlier Lubuntu versions, the default text editor was Leafpad, a very simple and lightweight text editor. Leafpad remains a good text editor, simple and fast to open, but it lacks features that would be useful for users coding or writing websites.

With the release of 18.10, Lubuntu moved from the previous GTK-based LXDE desktop, with its emphasis on low resource requirements and older computer hardware, to the newly fielded LXQt desktop, which is based upon the Qt widget toolkit. Along with the new desktop came a revised focus, as Lubuntu Release Manager, Simon Quigley explained, “Lubuntu will leverage modern, Qt-based technologies and programs to give users a functional yet modular experience… Lubuntu will keep a light experience by default but enable users to utilize more heavy and featureful components as desired”.

The desire to provide default applications that are Qt-based and which also offer more features to users, led to replacing Leafpad with FeatherPad in Lubuntu 18.10. FeatherPad is free software released under the GNU General Public License v3.0.

FeatherPad has been available in the Ubuntu repositories since 18.04 LTS, when version 0.8 was introduced in March 2018, so it can be installed in any ‘buntu flavor from 18.04 and later.

FeatherPad is developed by a team led by Pedram Pourang, also known as Tsu Jan. The project is relatively new, with the first public release, as version 0.5.8, on 15 October 2016. So far there have been 11 releases, the most recent being 0.9.3 on 5 February, 2019.

FeatherPad uses less RAM than some other text editors like Gedit or jEdit, but more than simpler text editors like LeafPad.

FeatherPad has obviously been designed for software developers, but it is also a good text editor for any general user to write plain text documents or web pages on. It opens quickly and presents a very clean, simple, tabbed interface. It offers some useful features, like context-sensitive syntax highlighting that varies by the document type (by assigned file extension, like .html), a large number of keyboard shortcuts, drag and drop, toggled side pane or tab navigation, search, replace, automatic page encoding detection, and a wide choice of fonts for composing.

Some of the keyboard shortcuts may take some getting used to, as they are non-standard. For instance Ctrl+W does not close the tab, instead it toggles word wrapping. Ctrl+Shift+Q closes the tab. Likewise Ctrl+Tab does not move between tabs, Alt+arrow does that. The keyboard shortcuts are all nicely explained in the menus, however, and, once learned, FeatherPad becomes very fast to use.

The find feature (Ctrl+F) and find-and-replace (Ctrl+R) both work very well. Hitting the keyboard shortcut opens the bottom “find bar” and a second use of the keyboard shortcut immediately hides it again, making it easy to keep the interface uncluttered without resorting to the mouse.

FeatherPad's syntax highlighting is fairly basic and certainly not as sophisticated as some other text editors. For instance jEdit picks up unencoded ampersands, whereas FeatherPad does not. However FeatherPad is a lot easier to configure than jEdit; it works great right out of the box.

The only feature on my personal wish list that FeatherPad presently lacks is spell-checking. If that were included in a future version, it would be the perfect text editor for my own particular use, as a website writer. Because FeatherPad is under active development, new features should be added quickly and it will be interesting to see what each new version release brings. The application’s website includes a change log.

I rate FeatherPad as 4.5/5. It is an excellent text editor, lightweight, and with a well designed interface, good features and keyboard shortcuts, lacking only spell-checking.

Website: https://github.com/tsujan/FeatherPad

Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/featherpad