Lite XL

A lightweight text editor written in Lua, adapted from Lite

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

The 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; 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 on Linux using the provided build.sh script or using the Meson build. 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 additional libraries libagg and Lua 5.2 are optional. If they are not found they will be included by the Meson build system.

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 use the commands:

# configure
meson setup build

# build
ninja -C build

# Only of linux:
ninja -C build install

When performing the "meson setup" command you may enable the "portable" option.

If this 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 want to install Lite XL on Windows or Mac OS X we suggest to use the script build-packages.sh:

bash build-packages.sh <version> <arch>

# In alternative the -portable option can be used like below:
# bash build-packages.sh -portable <version> <arch>

It will run meson and create a Zip file that can be easily installed or uninstalled.

Please note the, while compiling Lite XL on Mac OS X should work Mac OS X is not currently 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.