Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised May 30, 2026

Textadept

Textadept is a free software minimalist text editor designed for computer programming. Distributed under the MIT license, it is written in C, C++ and Lua and is extensible using Lua. Textadept can use either a graphical user interface or a text-based 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.

Last revised
May 30, 2026
Read time
≈ 1 min
Length
217 w
Citations
2
Source
Textadept
Original authorMitchell
Initial release2007 (2007)
Written inC, C++, Lua
Operating systemLinux, BSD, Microsoft Windows, macOS
TypeText editor
LicenseMIT
Websiteorbitalquark.github.io/textadept
Repository

Textadept is a free software minimalist text editor designed for computer programming. Distributed under the MIT license, it is written in C, C++ and Lua and is extensible using Lua.1 Textadept can use either a graphical user interface or a text-based 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.2

Similar to 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 lines. When running in a graphical interface Textadept purposely does not save window size or position, leaving this up to the window manager.

See also

See also

References

References

  1. "Review: Textadept". Archived from the original on 2018-09-09. Retrieved 2015-02-09.
  2. "Scinterm". Archived from the original on 2016-04-06. Retrieved 2015-02-27.
External links