[7] The program has a small footprint, similar to Leafpad,[7] but has additional features such as plugins, search history and automatic reloading.

[9] Mousepad was originally written as a fork of an existing text editor, Leafpad,[10] to improve support for printing.

[13] Though written for Linux, Mousepad has been ported to FreeBSD[14] and is also available for macOS via MacPorts,[15] and Microsoft Windows via Cygwin.

[18] In addition to plugin support,[8] Mousepad has features including tabs,[19] copy and paste, Undo/Redo, drag and drop, keyboard shortcuts,[20] printing, UTF-8 support, line numbers, searching capabilities (with a replace option), font selection, word wrap, automatic and multi-line indent, and both auto character coding detection and manual codeset options.

[22] DConf-0.40.0, a dconf package, and dbus-glib-0.112, a GLib tool to interface with D-Bus, are both optional dependencies, along with gspell, a spell-checker, and libxfce4ui, which may be used to display a widget in the XFCE desktop environment.