Allright so back in 2016 I managed to create my own custom Kali ISO. I've basically mastered the "process" of building the thing, including the chroot file structure and additional packages list and now I'm back at remastering my killer Kali build. The question is, how do I not include a certain package? Let's say I want my preferred text editor to be gedit and that's included in the kali.list.chroot file as the addition package for installation, I want to NOT include for example leafpad during the building of the live environment and/or at all. How do I go about it?

I've searched Google but the answer is nowhere to be found, I had a build hook where I echoed dpkg to 'hold' some metapackages in the sources list, but isn't that irrelevant?
Any help will be gladly appreciated! Thanks