The intent of this section is to collect the quite numerous frequently asked questions that relate to working with Mousepad. If you know of a question that is missing from this page, please file a request.
Yes, some of the settings in the mousepadrc file are not configurable from
the interface and can only be modified by hand. To find the mousepadrc file
see the section called “Where does Mousepad store its preferences?”. It is not recommended to change the
rc file using Mousepad, since it might be overwritten when you
close the window after editing. You must also restart Mousepad to
apply the settings. The hidden settings, starting with Misc,
are explained in the list below:
MiscAlwaysShowTabs
If TRUE the tab headers will always be displayed even if only a single
document tab is open. This option is useful if you want to drag-and-drop the last tab to
another window. See ???.
MiscCycleTabs
This option controls whether you can circulate through document tabs. That is, whether
you are able to go from the last tab to the first tab using the → entry
(or the associated keyboard shortcut), and from the first tab to the last tab using the
→ entry.
The option can be either TRUE or FALSE (default).
MiscPathInTitle
This option controls whether the full document path is displayed in the window title.
By default, FALSE, only the filename is shown. The option can be either
TRUE or FALSE.
MiscRecentMenuItems
This option controls the maximum number of items shown in the
→ menu. When you set the value to 0, so
entire menu will be hidden. The integer can be in a range of 0
..4096.
MiscRememberGeometry
Whether Mousepad should remember the size of windows and apply that size to
new windows. If TRUE (default) the width and height are saved
to WindowWidth and WindowHeight. If
FALSE the user may specify the start size in
WindowWidth and WindowHeight.
MiscDefaultTabSizes
This is the default list of tab sizes displayed in the →
menu. Each size must be in a range of 1..32.
By defaul the value is 2,3,4,8.
Mousepad stores the user configurable preferences (and hidden settings) in
an .ini file, which is located at
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/Mousepad/mousepadrc. If you make changes
to this file, make sure you restart Mousepad. It's also not recommended to
use Mousepad to edito this file, since it might overwrite it after you've
changed the file.
If you want to rebind a shortcut, Mousepad supports the standard GTK+ way of changing shortcuts: simply hover over the menu option with the mouse pointer and press the keyboard shortcut you want to rebind it to.
To delete a keyboard assignment, press the Backspace key while you are on the menu entry.
If the shortcut doesn't change, then you need to enable the feature in GTK+. This can be achieved in 3 ways:
If you are running Xfce 4.3 or above then you can enable Editable menu accelerators in the User Interface Preferences dialog.
If you are running GNOME then you can enable Editable menu accelerators in the Menu and Toolbars control center dialog.
Otherwise put the following in your ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file
(create the file if it doesn't exist):
gtk-can-change-accels=1
The custom keyboard shortcuts are stored in the standard GTK+ accel map format in a
file located at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/Mousepad/accels.scm. Lines starting
with ; are comments. See the GTK+ documentation for details about the
file format.
If you are a packager or a system administrator and want to provide a system wide default
for the keyboard shortcuts, that is different from the default shortcuts in Mousepad, you
can create a file Mousepad/accels.scm in one of the $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS.
For example, if /etc/xdg is part of $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS
(the default for most Linux distributions), you can install system wide defaults to
/etc/xdg/Mousepad/accels.scm. Mousepad will then load shortcuts from
this file on first startup.