Lite & Lite-XL & Pragtical (LUA-based text editors)

Submit portable freeware that you find here. It helps if you include information like description, extraction instruction, Unicode support, whether it writes to the registry, and so on.
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Midas
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Lite & Lite-XL & Pragtical (LUA-based text editors)

#1 Post by Midas »

Lite looked interesting, being lightweight, programmable (through Lua scripting) and multi-platform.

In my brief testing it appeared to be natively portable, which I guess depends on the environment options setup; as it is, most Lite's settings are kept in 'data/user/init.lua' inside the program's folder.

Lite has no visible menu or toolbars, it's entirely keyboard driven -- start with 'CTRL+SHFT+P' or 'CTRL+P', as advised...
lite is a lightweight text editor written mostly in Lua -- it aims to provide something practical, pretty, small and fast, implemented as simply as possible; easy to modify and extend, or to use without doing either. [...] 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.

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Lite latest is v1.11, released 2022-07-05 (changes and downloads at https://github.com/rxi/lite/releases).

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lintalist
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Re: Lite (LUA-based text editor)

#2 Post by lintalist »

If Lite it too light for you, you can try Lite XL, a fork of Lite, https://lite-xl.com/
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 font rendering, and reduce CPU usage.
(I haven't tested it for portability)

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Midas
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Re: Lite (LUA-based text editor)

#3 Post by Midas »

lintalist wrote: If Lite it too light for you...

You surely mean isn't light enough, right? :D

Great suggestion, BTW.

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Midas
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Re: Lite (LUA-based text editor)

#4 Post by Midas »

Finally managed to go check Lite-XL...
A lightweight, simple, fast, feature-filled, and extremely extensible text editor written in C, and Lua, adapted from lite.

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Latest Lite-XL is v2.1.0, released 2022-10-05 (changes and downloads at https://github.com/lite-xl/lite-xl/releases).

Softpedia review of Lite-XL v2.0.5, dated 2021-09-30, at www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/Text-editors/Lite-XL.shtml.

freakazoid
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Re: Lite & Lite-XL (LUA-based text editors)

#5 Post by freakazoid »

I was testing Lite XL today. It's not bad, but there are things I miss from other editors such as code folding. It's an editor to keep an eye on though.

To make Lite XL save settings in the same directory, create a directory called 'user' where lite-xl.exe resides.
is it stealth? ;)

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FileHandler
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Re: Lite & Lite-XL (LUA-based text editors)

#6 Post by FileHandler »

freakazoid wrote: Mon Jan 30, 2023 2:52 pm To make Lite XL save settings in the same directory, create a directory called 'user' where lite-xl.exe resides.
Thanks. This does work indeed. :idea:

I really like this editor, despite the shortcomings it certainly has. The speed is superb, though, and I like the versatile customizing with key-bindings and themes and the whole interface in general.

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lintalist
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Re: Lite & Lite-XL (LUA-based text editors)

#7 Post by lintalist »

Progress of lite-xl seems to a bit on the slow side, so ... a fork of a fork: Pragtical

Compared to lite-xl (around 5.5mb) the Pragtical folder will be 4+ times larger at 23.5mb but still light and feels as snappy as lite-xl.

Website: https://pragtical.dev/
GitHub: https://github.com/pragtical
Changelog: https://github.com/pragtical/pragtical/ ... angelog.md

"... download the zip archive, extract it and run it directly" -- https://pragtical.dev/docs/setup/windows

By default it stores settings: c:\Users\[username]\.config\pragtical\

To save settings in the same directory, create a directory called 'user' where pragtical.exe resides.

About
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 and merging code when logical.

freakazoid
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Re: Lite & Lite-XL (LUA-based text editors)

#8 Post by freakazoid »

lintalist wrote: Tue Dec 26, 2023 4:01 am Progress of lite-xl seems to a bit on the slow side, so ... a fork of a fork: Pragtical

Compared to lite-xl (around 5.5mb) the Pragtical folder will be 4+ times larger at 23.5mb but still light and feels as snappy as lite-xl.
Most of the new filesize can be attributed to a 12MB font file: https://github.com/pragtical/pragtical/ ... 1581650875

I'll keep an eye on Pragtical to see if they implement code folding, which is something I was missing from Lite XL.
is it stealth? ;)

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lintalist
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Re: Lite & Lite-XL (LUA-based text editors)

#9 Post by lintalist »

freakazoid wrote: Wed Dec 27, 2023 12:22 amI'll keep an eye on Pragtical to see if they implement code folding, which is something I was missing from Lite XL.
If I understood the various "issues" on the Lite-XL repo correctly, code folder should be possible in the editor so that might come a bit sooner to Pragtical given the practical nature :) (but I don't see it on the Pragtical issues as an item, yet)

freakazoid
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Re: Lite & Lite-XL & Pragtical (LUA-based text editors)

#10 Post by freakazoid »

Memory-wise, I've found Pragtical to use an additional 10MB RAM compared to Lite XL. Only did brief tests with loading one file for editing after startup.
is it stealth? ;)

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