It is developed by Pedram Pourang (aka Tsu Jan) of Iran, written in Qt, and runs on FreeBSD, Linux, Haiku OS and macOS.

[2] Future development goals for FeatherPad include syntax highlighting color customization, virtual desktop awareness and tab drag-and-drop under Wayland.

[6] FeatherPad includes text drag and drop support, search, search and replace, optional line numbering, automatic detection of text encoding, syntax highlighting for many common programming languages, ability to open URLs in a browser, optional side-pane or tabbed page navigation and spell-checking.

[5][10] The text editor is highly customizable and by default has a wide range of keyboard shortcuts defined.

"[5] Scott Nesbitt, writing in March 2020, on Red Hat's opensource.com noted, "when you first fire it up, FeatherPad doesn't look much different from most text editors out there.