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Change of habit: Geany out, Mousepad in

On a typical workday I open five GUI applications:

Geany was my everyday text editor for many years. When I first started with Geany, I saw it as an upgrade from Gedit, which came with the Gnome desktop environment. Like many other disappointed users, I abandoned Gnome ca 2011 (Gnome 3) for Xfce. Geany seemed faster than Gedit, had lots of programming aids and was good at loading and editing very large text files.

Meanwhile the developers of Mousepad, the default editor for Xfce, had been quietly adding features and fixing bugs. Mousepad now has what I need and I've changed from Geany for plain-text work, including coding.

I've only done two tweaks so far. The first was to expand the "custom dictionary" used by the spell-checking plugin. For my Australian English locale, that dictionary (word list) is ~/.config/enchant/en_AU.dic. If you right-click on a word flagged with an underline by the spell-checker, the "Spelling Suggestions" menu has an "Add" option. Choose "Add" and the underlined word is added to the custom dictionary.

That's fine for single-word additions, but my technical writing is full of strange words:

spell1

I've added a list of such words directly to ~/.config/enchant/en_AU.dic (it isn't necessary to sort them) and they're now ignored by the Mousepad spell-checker (gspell).

The second tweak was to add a new color scheme, or rather to modify one. Color schemes are stored in /usr/share/gtksourceview-4/styles, and for Mousepad version 0.63 the defaults are None, Classic, Cobalt, Kate, Oblivion, Solarized Dark, Solarized Light and Tango. The Gnome project has a list of other schemes and I chose Chela Light from these alternatives. I edited the XML to give me slightly different colors and emphasis, then saved the result as "my_chela_light.xml" with this modification to the ID line:

<style-scheme id="my_chela_light" _name="my_chela_light" version="1.0">

I then copied "my_chela_light.xml" from the desktop (where I'd been editing it) to /usr/share/gtksourceview-4/styles. The new color scheme appeared in the list in Mousepad's preferences (and its View menu), and I selected it.

spell2

A couple of other GtkSourceView color schemes have been written by Kristoffer Bernssen and are available on GitHub.

Next post:
2025-09-19   Another tricky formatting problem

Last update: 2025-09-12
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