Textadept



  1. Yesterday on Hacker News, someone commented Other editor users simply have no concept of how easy i. Tagged with textadept, texteditor, emacs.
  2. Textadept is a real cross-platform desktop application, backed by a world-class editing engine that dozens of editors and IDEs have depended on for over 19 years. Textadept is scriptable in a language that was carefully designed to run on any platform at high speed and with a minimal memory footprint.
  3. R/Textadept: Textadept is a fast, minimalist, and ridiculously extensible cross-platform text editor for programmers. Press J to jump to the feed. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts.

A fast, minimalist, and remarkably extensible cross-platform text editor

Download (v11.1)

Project Summary. Textadept is a fast, minimalist, and ridiculously extensible cross-platform text editor for programmers. Written in a combination of C and Lua and relentlessly optimized for speed and minimalism over the years, Textadept is an ideal editor for programmers who want endless extensibility without sacrificing speed or succumbing to code bloat and featuritis. Textadept is a fast, minimalist, and remarkably extensible cross-platform text editor for programmers. (by orbitalquark).

Nightly* Builds

Please donate or purchase the quick reference to help fund continuous development.

Features

Textadept is a fast, minimalist, and remarkably extensible cross-platform text editor.

Fast and Minimalist

Textadept

Wiki

Textadept’s user interface is sleek and simple. Relentlessly optimized for speed and minimalism over the years, the editor consists of less than 2000 lines of C code and less than 4000 lines of Lua code.

Cross Platform

Textadept runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, and BSD. It also has a terminal version, which is ideal for work on remote machines.

Remarkably Extensible

Textadept

Textadept

Textadept is an ideal editor for programmers who want endless extensibility without sacrificing speed or succumbing to code bloat and featuritis. The editor gives you complete control over the entire application using the Lua programming language. Everything from moving the caret to changing menus and key bindings on-the-fly to handling core events is possible. Its potential is vast.

Multiple Language Support

Being a programmer’s editor, Textadept excels at editing source code. It understands the syntax and structure of more than 100 different programming languages and recognizes hundreds of file types. Textadept uses this knowledge to make viewing and editing code faster and easier. It can also compile and run simple source files.

Unlimited Split Views

Both the graphical version and the terminal version of Textadept support unlimited vertical and horizontal view splitting, even of the same file.

Customizable Themes

Textadept uses themes to customize its look and feel. It comes with built-in light, dark, and terminal themes.

Code Autocompletion

Not only can Textadept autocomplete words in files, but it can also autocomplete symbols for programming languages and display API documentation.

Keyboard Driven

Textadept can be entirely keyboard driven. The editor defines key bindings for nearly every action. You can easily reassign existing bindings or create new ones. Keys may be chained together or grouped into language-specific keys or key modes.

Self Contained

Textadept’s binary packages are self-contained and need not be installed. No administrator privilages are required either.

Comprehensive Manual

Textadept comes with a comprehensive user manual in the application’s docs/ directory. It covers all of Textadept’s main features, including installation, usage, configuration, theming, scripting, and compilation.

Exhaustive API Documentation

Since Textadept is entirely scriptable with Lua, its API is heavily documented. This documentation is also located in docs/ and is the ultimate resource on scripting Textadept. (The editor’s Lua internals also provide abundant scripting examples.)

Quick Reference

This reference contains a wealth of knowledge on how to script and configure Textadept using Lua. It groups the editor’s rich API into a series of tasks in a convenient and easy-to-use manner. It serves as the perfect complement to Textadept’s Manual and API documentation.

Try It Yourself

Learn even more about Textadept by downloading and trying it out yourself. If you’re not completely satisfied, contact us or e-mail me personally (orbitalquark.att.triplequasar.com). You may also fork the project, submit patches, or sponsor a feature. Textadept is 100% open source.

  • Textadept has a proven track record, with at least one release every 2 months for 8+ years and no signs of inactivity. Also, as an open-source project, the editor will never fade away.
  • Textadept is a real cross-platform desktop application, backed by a world-class editing engine that dozens of editors and IDEs have depended on for over 19 years.
  • Textadept is scriptable in a language that was carefully designed to run on any platform at high speed and with a minimal memory footprint. Lua is used everywhere from video games to embedded devices. It is easy to learn too!
  • Textadept is very resource efficient, consuming merely 15MB of RAM at startup and hardly any CPU while under load. Even with over 20 of its own source files open at once, Textadept does not exceed 20MB of RAM usage and has no input lag at all.
  • Textadept does not rely on external packages to provide its functionality and does not depend on a package ecosystem to thrive. The editor gives you plenty of the tools you need out of the box.
  • Textadept has sensible defaults and does not expect you to spend hours customizing it before you can start being productive.
  • With fewer than 30 main source files comprising roughly 6000 lines of heavily documented code, Textadept’s internals are remarkably easy to read, understand, keep track of, and extend to your liking.
  • Did you see that there is a terminal version in case you need to do work on a remote server?
  • Textadept does not track you. It does not attempt to connect to the internet. It is just a text editor.

FAQ · Credits

*Warning: nightly builds are untested, may have bugs, and are the absolute cutting-edge versions of Textadept. Do not use them in production, but for testing purposes only.

Textadept is a cross-platform text editor for programmers, extensible through Lua scripting language.
I've used Textadept for a very short period of time but WebUpd8 reader Bruce Ingalls is using it for a while so below he will try to tell you his experience with Textadept.

I program on Mac, Windows & Linux-like systems. It is essential to find a text editor, that I can learn just once, and use on all of them. This editor must also be free/open, to allow the freedom of moving around. Perhaps this is why R. Stallman's first free software was an editor.
I use Vi(m) for quick, small jobs, and Emacs, Eclipse, or Netbeans, if available. Vim & Emacs work well anywhere, but they are not user friendly. I started using Gtk based SciTE, but am disappointed that no native binary is available for Mac OSX.

DISADVANTAGES
  • TextAdept does not have pre-built binaries for Solaris, *BSD, Cygwin, or other less popular systems.
  • TextAdept leaves out SciTE's extra visual components, such as tabbed documents, or editing preferences.
  • TextAdept, like SciTE, does not work in a text console, so you'll still want vim, emacs, pico, or nedit.
  • You cannot save preferences, and help is minimal, only on the web.
  • If you already know that Ctrl-space completes a word, then you likely don't need help.
  • Still, there are hidden gems, such as Alt-o, to load the recent file list.
  • Here, I (Andrew) would also like to add that Textadept is a bit difficult to configure as you must go through configuration files if you want to change the font or theme for instance. For info on this, see the Textadept manual page.

ADVANTAGES
  • TextAdept is fast & light! TextAdept alone is only about 1M. (Standard Gtk libs add about 15M)
  • With a single C file, TextAdept compiles easily, once you have the Gtk v2.x development files (*.h headers).
  • TextAdept supports the essentialls of the Gnome HIG Human Interface Guidelines. This means that the keybindings you are familiar with on MS, Mac & Linux will generally work. This includes Ctl-x to cut, Ctl-tab to switch open files, and Ctl-q to quit.
  • Minimal design maximizes screen real estate. Great for netbooks!
  • TextAdept has text editing essentials, with syntax coloring.
  • Everything else, such as code completion, is extended with Lua scripting. Also, TextAdept has a Lua module, that can run most TextMate templates.
  • Available modules include support for Java, Python, Ruby and recent file lists.
  • Lua is an up-and-coming scripting language, powering lighttpd, iphone, and more.

MISSING
  • TextAdept does not have a print menu.
  • TextAdept does not have a lua module to copy file saves via scp, automatically (via scp). I hope that Webupd8 has some expert lua programming readers. How hard is it, to get lua to call a2ps or ssh? This should be reasonable, with an external command.

TextAdept took about half a minute to load my 42M text file of 1.2 million lines, and did so, without crashing. Some other editors warn of crashing, before attempting this.
I've yet to simulate recovery capabilities; `vi -r`, or emacs will prompt to load unsaved changes.
Generally, TextAdept's smart editing, such as automatic indenting works well, because it is kept to a minimum. The only annoyance I've found, is that TextAdept builds matching quotes, prompting 'I've' in this sentence.

Install Textadept in Ubuntu


To make it easier to install under Ubuntu 11.04 and 10.10 (sorry, I couldn't get it to work on Ubuntu 10.04, at least not on 64bit), you can add the WebUpd8 PPA and install Textadept using the following commands:
You can also download Textadept binaries (for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X) as well as the source code via its download page as well as this Github page (packages by Bruce).

This post was written by WebUpd8 reader Bruce Ingalls.