Pragtical

The practical and pragmatic code editor.

Pragtical is a code editor which was forked from Lite XL (also a fork of lite) written mostly in Lua with a focus on been practical rather than minimalist. The name of the editor is a mixture of the words pragmatic and practical, two words that properly define our development approach as follows:

governed through practice or action, rather than theory, speculation or idealism
willing to see things as they really are and deal with them sensibly

As a result we belief that new features introduced through pull requests should be evaluated taking a practical approach, without going into lenghty idealistic discussions that slowdown progress, merging code when logical.

Goals

We differentiate from our ancestors by striving to make Pragtical an editor that has amplified the set of features, to give you and us a better out of the box experience, while keeping an eye on performance and ease of extensibility. Also, we are simplifying the release process by reducing the amount of builds to choose from and trying a release often approach.

Performance

JIT - Pragtical takes a LuaJIT first approach, meaning that our official builds use LuaJIT instead of PUC Lua for the performance benefits that come with it. Also having a LuaJIT first approach gives us FFI for free which allows easy interfacing with native C libraries for easier plugin development. LuaJIT has proven to be a mature Lua implementation that will provide a stable development ecosystem for the foreseeable future.
Threading - a supported feature inside the core on components where it is practical to use, like file searching and replacing, where performance gains are evident.

More Features

Widgets - more tightly integrated as part of the core for easier gui development and reusability, also ensuring that plugin developers can with more ease develop user interfaces when in need.
Settings UI - if you are not using a terminal editor like n/vim it means you are looking for a more point and click approach which is why we include a graphical interface to adjust your preferences out of the box. But don't worry, configuring the editor through Lua will keep working because it is also pragtical 😉
Encoding - while UTF-8 has overtaken as the preferred encoding for text documents for its convenience, we can sometimes encounter a document in another encoding. Loading and saving documents with different encodings will be supported for when the need arrives, a feature that is also commonly found in other editors because it is pragtical.
IPC - shared memory functionality is part of the core and IPC plugin shipped by default to allow opening files and tab dragging between currently opened instances.

Download

Get Pragtical — Download Pre-built releases for Windows, Linux and Mac OS.
Get Plugins — Add additional functionality, adapted for Pragtical.
Get Color Themes — Additional color themes (bundled with all releases of Pragtical by default).

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

Please refer to our website for the user and developer documentation, including more detailed build instructions. A quick build guide is described below.

Quick Build Guide

First, clone this repository and initialize the widget submodule:

git clone https://github.com/pragtical/pragtical
git submodule update --init

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

bash build-packages.sh -h

The script will run Meson and create a tar compressed archive with the application or, for Windows, a zip file. Pragtical can be easily installed by unpacking the archive in any directory of your choice.

Otherwise the following is an example of basic commands if you want to customize the build:

meson setup --buildtype=release --prefix <prefix> build
meson compile -C build
DESTDIR="$(pwd)/pragtical" meson install --skip-subprojects -C build

where <prefix> might be one of /, /usr or /opt, the default is /. To build a bundle application on macOS:

meson setup --buildtype=release --Dbundle=true --prefix / build
meson compile -C build
DESTDIR="$(pwd)/Pragtical.app" meson install --skip-subprojects -C build

Please note that the package is relocatable to any prefix and the option prefix affects only the place where the application is actually installed.

Contributing

Feel free to contribute something that would be convenient and "Pragtical" to include on the core, you are welcome to open a pull request and contribute.

Any additional functionality that can be added through a plugin should be done 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.

Licenses

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

See the licenses directory for details on licenses used by the required dependencies.

franko/pragtical