FeatherPad

★★★★☆

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.

There are a few things that still frustrate me. It doesn’t auto-switch between dark and light mode, for instance, and I switch between modes regularly depending on ambient lighting. Spell check is limited, and search is a bit jankier than I’d like. But it does the job, and does it fast, and I can always fire up another editor like Sublime Text when I do need something more elaborate.

Featherpad is available in most Linux distributions I’ve tried (including Fedora, Debian and Arch), but not on Alpine Linux unless you want to use the testing repo.