The reasons why Leafpad is fine

[Patrick Johnson]

On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 7:55 AM, Darshak Parikh (via K-9 Mail)
<wizard.darshak at gmail.com> wrote:
> But you see, not all users are programmers. Moreover, not all programmers
> prefer Gedit. There's Emacs, Geany, Nano, and many more.

I don't see why Gedit in it's default state isn't also good for
non-programmers.  Gedit is the default for Ubuntu and Mint.  That it
can also be used by programmers and extended with plugins is another
selling point.

> Again, Gedit does indeed provide more customization, which Leafpad doesn't.
> But Leafpad at least obediently follows the GTK+ theme, which is enough. And
> it does what a text editor is supposed to do. It gets the job done without
> any hassles. And that's what Xubuntu is all about, isn't it?

I'm unsure how big a deal following the theme is.  Lots of apps don't
follow the theme, correct?  When I install Gedit in Xubuntu I've never
noticed the theme being a problem.

> PERFORMANCE
> Gedit takes around thrice as long as Leafpad to start up. The difference is
> clearly noticeable on older hardware, where Gedit might take around 3-4
> seconds, whereas Leafpad pops up within the blink of an eye.

Recently a decision was made with the kernel to drop i386 support.  At
some point you need to recognize that the older hardware should no
longer be the major concern, and that with more recent (not even
relatively new) hardware that the difference is not noticeable.  The
discussion which prompted this for me was Abiword vs Openoffice.
There is clear difference there.  Gedit and Leafpad, relatively not so
much.

---
Patrick Johnson