Introduction

Overview

Textadept

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 options without sacrificing speed or succumbing to code bloat and featuritis.

Fast

Textadept is fast. It starts up instantly and has a very responsive user interface (UI). Even though the editor is mostly written in Lua, Lua is one of the fastest scripting languages available. With LuaJIT, Textadept is faster than ever before, though using LuaJIT is overkill.

Minimalist

Textadept is minimalist. Not only is this apparent in the UI, but the editor's C core was designed to never exceed 2000 lines of code and its Lua extension code is not supposed to go beyond 4000 lines. After 4 1/2 years of development, Textadept has fewer lines of code (~5000) than it did in its first release (~5600) and is vastly superior in every respect.

Ridiculously Extensible

Textadept is ridiculously extensible. It was designed to be that way from the very beginning. The features came later. Most of Textadept is written in Lua, from syntax highlighting to opening and saving files to searching and replacing and more. Textadept gives you complete control over the entire application using Lua. You can do everything from moving the caret to changing menus and key commands on-the-fly to handling UI events. The possibilities are limitless.

Split Views

Manual Notation

  • ~/ is denoted as the user's home directory. On Windows machines this is the value of the USERHOME environment variable (typically C:\Users\<username>\ or C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\). On Linux and Mac OSX machines it is the value of HOME (typically /home/<username>/ and /Users/<username>/ respectively).
  • Any relative directory paths, i.e. paths that do not begin with / or C:\, are relative to the location of Textadept.
  • Key combinations are not case-sensitive. Ctrl+N means the N key is pressed with only the Control key being held down, not the Shift key. Ctrl+Shift+N means the N key is pressed with both Control and Shift keys being held down. The same notation is applicable to key chains: Ctrl+N, N vs. Ctrl+N, Shift+N. In the first key chain, Control and N are pressed followed by N with no modifiers. The second has Control and N pressed followed by Shift and N.
  • When mentioning key commands, the Mac OSX equivalent will often be shown in parenthesis. It may be tempting to assume that some Windows/Linux keys map to Mac OSX's (e.g Ctrl to ⌘), but this is not always the case. Please do not view the key equivalents as translations of one another, but rather as separate entities. This will minimize confusion.

Features at a Glance

  • Self-contained executable - no installation necessary.
  • Entirely keyboard driven.
  • Unlimited split views.
  • Support for over 80 programming languages.
  • Powerful snippets and key commands.
  • Code autocompletion and API lookup.
  • Unparalleled extensibility.

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