Lite XL

A lightweight text editor written in Lua, adapted from Lite

• Get Lite XL — Download for Windows and Linux
• Get started — A quick overview on how to get started
• Get plugins — Add additional functionality, adapted for Lite XL
• Get color themes — Add additional colors themes

Please note that Lite XL is compatible with Lite for all the plugins and color themes. Yet we provide a specific lite-plugins directory for Lite XL because in some cases some adaptations may be needed to make them work better with Lite XL. The address for modified plugins is http://github.com/franko/lite-plugins. Currently only the "workspace" plugin needs a minor adjustment to restore the workspace when the command core:restart is used.

The changes and differences between Lite XL and rxi/lite are listed in the changelog.

Overview

Lite XL is derived from Lite. It is a lightweight text editor written mostly in Lua — it aims to provide something practical, pretty, small and fast easy to modify and extend, or to use without doing either.

The aim of Lite XL compared to Lite is to be more user friendly, improve the quality of the font rendering and reduce CPU usage.

Customization

Additional functionality can be added through plugins which are available from the plugins repository or from the plugin repository adapted to Lite XL; additional color themes can be found in the colors repository. The editor can be customized by making changes to the user module.

Building

You can build the project yourself using the Meson build.

In addition the script build-packages.sh can be used to compile Lite XL and create a package adapted to the OS, Linux, Windows or Mac OS X.

The following libraries are required:

• freetype2
• SDL2

The libraries libagg and Lua 5.2 are optional. If they are not found they will be automatically downloaded and compiled by the Meson build system. Otherwise, if they are present they will be used to compile Lite XL.

On a debian based systems the required library and Meson can be installed using the commands:

# To install the required libraries:
sudo apt install libfreetype6-dev libsdl2-dev

# To install Meson:
sudo apt install meson
# or pip3 install --user meson

To build Lite XL with Meson the commands below can be used:

meson setup build
meson compile -C build
meson install -C build

When performing the "meson setup" command you may enable the "portable" option to choose the kind of install.

If the portable option latter is enabled Lite XL is built to use a "data" and a "user" directory from the same directory of the executable. If "portable" is not enabled (this is the default) Lite XL will use unix-like directory locations. In this case the "data" directory will be $prefix/share/lite-xl and the "user" directory will be $HOME/.config/lite-xl. The $prefix is determined as the directory such as $prefix/bin corresponds to the location of the executable. The $HOME is determined from the corresponding environment variable. As a special case on Windows the variable $USERPROFILE will be used instead.

If you compile lite-xl yourself it is recommended to use the script build-packages.sh:

bash build-packages.sh <arch>

It will run meson and create two zip files, one for the portable version and one for the unix-like version. Lite XL can be easily installed by unpacking one of the zip archive in a directory of your choice.

Please note that no directory is not hard-coded in the exectuable so that the package can be extracted and used in any directory.

Note also that the unix-like package can work on windows as well.

Please note that while compiling Lite XL on Mac OS X should work Mac OS X is not officially supported.

Contributing

Any additional functionality that can be added through a plugin should be done so as a plugin, after which a pull request to the plugins repository can be made.

Pull requests to improve or modify the editor itself are welcome.

License

This project is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the MIT license. See LICENSE for details.