Original author(s) | ||
Initial release 2007; 10 years ago (2007) Stable release 9.3 / February 28, 2017; 30 days ago (2017-02-28) Operating system | ||
Textadept is a free software minimalist text editor designed for computer programming. Distributed under the MIT license, it is written in C and Lua and is extensible using Lua. Textadept can use either a Graphical User Interface or a Text User Interface when running in a terminal window. Textadept uses the Scintilla editing component. Textadept's developer makes the curses wrapper library for Scintilla used by Textadept available separately. Both graphical and terminal varieties are optionally available in versions using LuaJIT for just in time compilation. The JIT versions are no longer recommended as the speed benefit they used to provide is no longer significant after version 6.1
Reviewers have found Textadept's GUI-inherited key bindings to be more familiar than those that vim, Emacs or nano use by default but have found flaws in Textadept's curses interface.
In common with Emacs, Textadept is deeply extensible; the Lua API has access to any subsystem of the program. Despite this, the developer states that one of his goals is for the C portion to not exceed 2000 lines of code and for the Lua portion to never exceed 4000 LOC. When running in a graphical interface Textadept purposely does not save window size or position, leaving this up to the window manager.