"Simple text editor" mousepad handles Prolog syntax highlighting

Nice to know
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I recently switched from gedit to mousepad as part of getting fed up with Gnome and switching to Xfce.

Though mousepad modestly describes itself as “a simple text editor”, a pleasant surprise is it probably supports syntax highlighting for more programing languages and data types than anything I’ve encountered outside of Emacs.

Besides Prolog, mousepad also does Logtalk. It supports so many different syntaxes that Document > Filetype takes you to five options (Markup, Other, Scientific, Script, Source) and Source is the one you’ll find Prolog in.

These days Atom seems to be the favoured open source text editor, and besides Prolog text highlighting it does linting, but I personally hate IDEs that obscure what I’m typing behind pop-up error boxes while I’m mid sentence.

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Lately I’ve been using SCite with the “Ada” color scheme, I feel fine. I made a few tweaks to it but only for font use.

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I see mousepad uses GtkSourceView for syntax highlighting, and I’d guess gedit does too.

It’s interesting to see how many programing languages, markup formats etc there are by scrolling through the myriad of options available.

A frustration with both gedit and mousepad is they assumes any *.pl file is Perl, so one has to manually correct that to Prolog. But once it’s been done for a file, it remembers next time it gets loaded.