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Textadept
- WalterGR 8mo agoWhat GUI text editor widget does it use, or is it home-grown? I don’t see it mentioned.
- jrm4 8mo ago? Seems to support GTK, Qt and ncurses?
- davidkwast 8mo agoI saw that in the code on the github repo
- keithnz 8mo agolooks like it uses scintilla
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Fwirt 8mo agoIt uses Scintilla. In fact, at its core, it’s basically just a wrapper around the Scintilla message passing API. There’s a Lua script that parses the Scintilla header files to create the Lua tables that interface with the Scintilla library.
- benrutter 8mo ago> Unlimited split views. Ok, well now I have to find out what hapoens if I get enough splits to make the width of each less than a pixel.
- Fwirt 8mo agoThe splits functionality is one of its weaknesses right now IMO, but there are some improvements in the works.
- throwaw12 8mo agoDo we still need text editors in the AI agents era? /s
- jasperry 8mo agoI've looked into TextAdept a few times. It appeals to me because it's got a standard Qt UI, is fast and lightweight and highly customizable with Lua. But I could never commit the time to fully customize it for daily use. Anyway, I'm committed to emacs. Other Scintilla-based editors with a similar feel (but missing the Lua angle) are Geany and Kate.
- ramoz 8mo agoBeautiful landing page
- mjtk 8mo agoAlways nice to see open source text editors, in my opinion. Textadept's codebase is a fine example.
- eleventyseven 8mo agoI recommend capitalizing TextAdept, as it took me way way way too long to figure out it wasn't text a dept (SMS which department????)
- dang 8mo agoRelated. Others? TextAdept - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39571814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39571814 - March 2024 (31 comments)
- crefiz 8mo agoWhat's the point of this comment?
- oneeyedpigeon 8mo agodang is a mod—as far as I'm aware, they are the mod. When a previously-covered story crops up again, they typically add a comment like this with links to previous discussions, so you can easily see what was said before.
- dang 8mo agoone of the mods, along with tomhow! Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43558671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43558671 - April 2025 (462 comments)
- dang 8mo agooneeyedpigeon already explained it, but allow me to follow up with more information:* You can see a zillion examples here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20related%20others&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... The purpose is to satisfy extra-curious readers (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20extra%20curious&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) who might want to read previous discussions of the same story. No criticism is intended! I add this because sometimes people think there's an implied "why did you repost this, it's already been discussed" - but not at all: reposts on HN are fine after about a year or so: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20reposts%20year&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... * than you could possibly want, but oh well
- rationably 8mo agoThere is also NotepadNext which is oddly similar, sans the Lua: https://github.com/dail8859/NotepadNext https://github.com/dail8859/NotepadNext
- rickstanley 8mo agoI downloaded it recently and found it to be quite useful for quick notes. And I can attest to its "fast" claim, using it on a heavily monitored corporate computer, with CrowStrike and what-not; curiously, and I may being hyperbolic here, but, I got the feeling that it was opening faster than MS Notepad, even with Copilot disabled. The only thing missing is for me is the "save temporary file" behavior, as I have this habit of making a quick note, close to save up space, both in RAM and view, then later on, fire it up again. Will see if there's a Lua api for this later.
- bccdee 8mo agoSounds like you're looking for the scratch file extension [1] [1]: https://github.com/orbitalquark/textadept-scratch https://github.com/orbitalquark/textadept-scratch
- rickstanley 8mo agoThat is exactly it. Much appreciated.
- evanjrowley 8mo agoIf I was malware, one of the first things I'd do is check that scratch files directory for secrets. The default behavior of Notepad++ is a very real security risk. So many system admins and developers will throw passwords and API keys into there and just forget about it. The scratch files are all sitting there unencrypted and with easy to exploit permissions. Alas, my first thought after seeing TextAdept was that it could serve as a more secure alternative to Notepad++.
- rickstanley 8mo agoI have this view as well. After years of Notepad++, the last security problem made me want to switch, not because of just that, but that, overall, since the author has an active voice expressing his political views (which is totally fine), I have this unease feeling that it makes him, and his products, a notorious target. Searching for alternatives, Textadept seemed to fill the gap between features, speed and simplicity. The plugin mentioned by the parent is really easy to grasp and tailor to my needs, which would not be the case with Notepad++, well, not for me at least.
- sea-gold 8mo agoCheck out Lite XL (also Lua-based) [1] https://github.com/lite-xl/lite-xl https://github.com/lite-xl/lite-xl [2] https://lite-xl.com/ https://lite-xl.com/
- omgtehlion 8mo agotried this one: failed to open any file in my home directory, as it contains non-latin characters...
- Paddyz 8mo ago[dead]
- Fwirt 8mo agoGlad to see this hit the front page again! I’ve been making some contributions lately and it introduced me to Lua. At its core it’s basically a very thin wrapper around the Scintilla editing component used by many open source editors. I’ve been working on getting some lower level APIs added for more control over the UI. Mitchell is to be commended for maintaining the editor solo for so many years and keeping the LOC count really low (2000 lines of C, 4000 lines of Lua). If you’re willing to read the source it’s really easy to wrap your head around the whole thing, which can’t be said for Emacs or Vim. When I find the time I’ll finish my vi mode…
- Surac 8mo agoNice. Im looking for such projects. Will give it a try
- larodi 8mo agoWithout any sarcasm, really, what is the value proposition in this one, that would make someone ditch Sublime Text for it?
- oneeyedpigeon 8mo agoI haven't spent much time with it at all, but my very early impressions are: - (Fairly) low memory footprint - Nice approach to buffers which seems to borrow from vi - Apparent very high extensibility using lua
- throwaway290 8mo agoNo sarcasm intended, but probably same reasons lots of people ditch sublime after trying it for a day;)
- larodi 8mo agohm... whole industry embraced its approach to palette of tools, dunno what you mean really :D I still try to avoid it for more than 10 years now, but is on all my compatible boxes. of course, knowledge of VIM is essential to anyone when doing CLIs.
- throwaway290 8mo agoI don't know anybody using Sublime:) what means "palette of tools"?
- deltarholamda 8mo agoCan't speak to ditching a preferred text editor for this one, as text editors are one of the most highly personal preferences in computing. But as a guy that teaches kids about computing and system administration, having another option to demonstrate is excellent. For many things something like nano is fine, but for something a bit more robust? And is available for many platforms? And is small and self-contained? It's a great option. The Lua extensibility is also a bonus. Teaching teenagers how to use vim or emacs is, not surprisingly, a bit of a chore.
- 8mo ago
- Tepix 8mo agoThe features list mentions: - Configurable key bindings, including language-specific keys, key chains, and key modes. Does this include being able to make it feel like vi/vim?
- sigzero 8mo agoFrom the web page: You can also group key bindings into modes such that while a mode is active, Textadept ignores all key bindings outside that mode until the mode is unset (e.g. Vim-style modal editing). The keys documentation describes all of this in more detail.
- najarvg 8mo agoThis is a great project! Is there a place to look up the list of inbuilt lexers to understand the editor language support? Will forward to my (more hands-on devs) team members.
- Fwirt 8mo agoLexing is handled by one of Mitchell's other projects, Scintillua. You'll find the source for all the built-in lexers in there. https://github.com/orbitalquark/scintillua https://github.com/orbitalquark/scintillua The documentation for Scintillua also gets pulled into Textadept's API documentation as a dependency, so the syntax is also explained there. It's basically a bridge between Scintilla's native lexing and LPeg.
- textadept-thrwy 8mo agoI developed some plugins for Textadept some time ago. It's very lightweight and mature, but its dependence on different backends on different platforms introduced some frictions (QT vs. GTK etc.). We had a working Mermaid and image viewer plugin. It's really extensible. Never upstreamed them though. It uses Lua LPEG lexers, which are extremely easy way to de develop syntax parsers/LSPs for new or unsupported languages. Eventually our project moved to Pragtical, which has SDL as a cross-platform backend and uses the more modern meson as the build system, which made developing for it much easier.
- SpartanJ 8mo agoShameless plug: For anyone interested in new code editors, I'm working on a multi-platform one called ecode [1]. It's similar in spirit to Notepad++ and Textadept, and some of the newer ones like Zed. It tries to be a fresh take using modern tools like LSP and DAP. I started it after using Geany for many years but finding it lacking some essential features for my needs. Speed is a big focus and it has very fast startup time. [1] https://github.com/SpartanJ/ecode/ https://github.com/SpartanJ/ecode/
- knowitnone3 8mo ago[dead]