Try TextAdept, A Fast, Cross-Platform Text Editor That Comes With GTK And Ncurses Interfaces

TextAdept is a fast, minimalistic text editor that can be extended through Lua. The application is free, open source and runs on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux.

TextAdept features unlimited split views, support for over 80 programming languages, powerful snippets and key commands, code autocompletition and API lookup and is entirely keyboard driven.

Since our last TextAdept article, the application has improved a lot, getting many new features and other changes, including:

• menu mnemonics for indentation size;
• support for indicator and hotspot events;
• added native folding for more than 60% of existing lexers. The rest still use folding by indentation by default;
• added language-specific context menu support;
• new dark and light themes and on-the-fly theme switching;
• autocomplete supports multiple selections;
• more!

textadept-ncurses

There's also a ncurses version now, so you can run TextAdept in the terminal. The ncurses-based TextAdept is very user-friendly and easy to use - it follows the GNOME HID (Human Interface Design) key-bindings standard for many actions so you can use: Ctrl + s to save the file, Ctrl + o to open a file, Ctrl + q to quit and so on.

TextAdept buffers

TextAdept doesn't uses tabs like most text editors and instead it uses the buffer browser - press Ctrl + b to open the buffers (files) switching dialog or use Ctrl + Tab to switch to the next buffer or Ctrl + Shift + Tab to switch to the previous one. Alternatively, you can also bring up the recent files dialog using Ctrl + Alt + o. And there is yet another way to quickly open files: snapopen, which behaves like the buffer browser, but displays a list of files to open which includes files in subdirectories - you can snapopen the current directory files using Ctrl + Alt + Shift + o.

You can find the list of key bindings for both the GTK and terminal version HERE.

For extra TextAdept language modules, including LaTeX, Python, Markdown, CoffeeScript and so on, see the TextAdept wiki.

Download TextAdept

Download TextAdept - there are binaries available for Linux (as tar.gz, so there are no deb or rpm files but you can simply extract the archive and run it), Windows and Mac OS X as well as source files.

Arch Linux users can install the latest stable TextAdept version via AUR.

Ubuntu users can install TextAdept using using the main WebUpd8 PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install textadept

TextAdept should then show up in the menu / Dash. To use the ncurses-based version, type "textadept-curses" in a terminal.

If you want to make textadept-ncurses the default command line editor in Ubuntu, also install the following package:

sudo apt-get install textadept-default-cli

For how to use TextAdept, see the manual and its wiki as well as the doc/ folder available in the TextAdept archive (available under /opt/textadept/doc for Ubuntu users who are using our PPA).

Thanks to Bruce Ingalls!