mousepad vs leafpad

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 27 May 2018 13:57:37 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>As a starting point take a look at the size of the files of at least
>those three editors.
>
>$ ls -hAl /usr/bin/mousepad /usr/bin/pluma /usr/bin/xed
>-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 238K Nov 11  2017 /usr/bin/mousepad
>-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 638K Apr 11 02:29 /usr/bin/pluma
>-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 9.9K May 10 22:26 /usr/bin/xed
>
>The size of those files alone is not necessarily entire meaningful, but
>it at least is a pointer.

Btw. the install size is also not that meaningful.

$ pacman -Qi mousepad pluma xed | grep Size
Installed Size  : 1088.00 KiB
Installed Size  : 16.23 MiB
Installed Size  : 10.81 MiB

How many comments are in the header files? They are anyway not required
at runtime.
How many own libs are used and what's their size and the size of the
dependencies?
How many dependencies are used and what's their size?
What plugins are used and what are their dependencies?
How good is the used software and it's dependencies programmed?

So storage and RAM usage as well as performance depend on a lot of
things. The only way to find out is running the software. Mousepad for
sure is most lightweight regarding features and size, but how much does
it matter regarding the computer's resources, as well as the quality of
the code? Etc. pp..

How long does it take to load the software, if it isn't cached? Is
amount of RAM used by the software's code and e.g. tmpfs etc.
important? Does running the software has noticeable impact on
performance of other software?

What's important to you? Just test different editors.