Contents

Adept Editing

Basic Editing

Textadept has many basic editing features you are familiar with: basic text entry, undo/redo, clipboard manipulation, deleting characters and words, duplicating lines, joining lines, and transposing characters. These are accessible from the top-level “Edit” menu and have associated key bindings. Some of the basic editing features you may not be familiar with are discussed below.

Autopaired Characters

Usually, quote (‘'’, ‘"’) and brace (‘(’, ‘[’, ‘{’) characters go together in pairs. By default, Textadept automatically inserts the complement character when the first is typed. Similarly, the complement is deleted when you press Bksp ( on Mac OSX | Bksp in curses) over the first. Typing over complement characters is also supported. See the preferences page if you would like to disable these features.

Word Completion

Textadept provides buffer-based word completion. Start typing a word, press Ctrl+Enter (^⎋ on Mac OSX | M-Enter in curses), and a list of suggested completions based on words in the current buffer is provided. Continuing to type changes the suggestion. Press Enter ( | Enter) to complete the selected word.

Word Completion

Virtual Space Mode

Virtual space (freehand) mode is enabled and disabled with Ctrl+Alt+Shift+V (^⇧V in Mac OSX | none in curses). When enabled, caret movement is not restricted by line endings.

Overwrite Mode

Overwrite mode is enabled and disabled with the Insert key. When enabled, characters in the buffer will be overwritten instead of inserted as you type. The caret also changes to an underline when in overwrite mode.

Selections

Textadept has many ways of creating and working with selections. Basic selections are what you get when you do things like hold the “Shift” modifier key while pressing the arrow keys, click and drag the mouse over a range of text, or press Ctrl+A (⌘A | M-A) for “Select All”. More advanced selections like multiple and rectangular selections are more complicated to create, but have powerful uses.

Multiple Selection

Clicking the mouse at a point in the buffer while holding the “Control” modifier key places an additional caret at that point. Clicking and dragging while holding the same modifier creates multiple selections. When you start typing, the text is mirrored at each selection.

Creating multiple selections with the mouse is currently unavailable in curses.

Rectangular Selection

Holding Alt+Shift (⌥⇧ on Mac OSX | M-S- in curses) and pressing the arrow keys enables rectangular selections to be made. Start typing to type on each line. You can also hold the “Alt” modifier key (“Super” on Linux) while clicking and dragging the mouse to create rectangular selections.

Rectangular Selection      Rectangular Edit

Note: In some Linux environments, the Alt+Shift+Arrow combinations are used by the window manager and may need to be reconfigured. Also, Super+Mouse is used because Alt+Mouse generally moves windows. If you prefer to use “Alt”, you can change buffer.rectangular_selection_modifier in your theme. The “Super” modifier key is usually defined as the left “Windows” key, but may need to be reconfigured too.

Creating rectangular selections with the mouse is currently unavailable in curses.

Select to Matching Brace

Putting the caret over a brace character (‘(’, ‘)’, ‘[’, ‘]’, ‘{’, or ‘}’) and pressing Ctrl+Shift+M (^⇧M on Mac OSX| M-S-M in curses) extends the selection to the brace character’s matching brace.

Entity Selection

Textadept allows you to select many different entities from the caret. For example, Ctrl+" (^" on Mac OSX | M-" in curses) selects all characters in a double-quoted range. Typing Ctrl++ (^+ | M-+) as a follow-up selects the double-quotes too. See the “Edit -> Select In…” menu for available entities and their key bindings.

Marks

In curses, since some terminals do not recognize certain key combinations like Shift+Arrow for making selections, you can use marks to create selections. Create a mark at the current caret position with ^^. Then use regular movement keys like the arrows, page up/down, and home/end to extend the selection in one direction. Pressing ^] swaps the current caret position with the original mark position so you can extend the selection in the opposite direction. Any time you type text, delete text, or run a command that does either, the mark is removed and ordinary navigation is restored. You can also press ^^ again to stop selecting text.

Marks are only supported in curses.

Transforms

Enclose Entities

As a complement to selecting entities, you can enclose text as entities. The “Edit -> Selection -> Enclose In…” menu contains all available entities and their key bindings.

If no text is selected, the word to the left of the caret is enclosed. For example, pressing Alt+< (^< on Mac OSX | M-> in curses) at the end of a word encloses it in XML tags.

Change Case

Pressing Ctrl+Alt+U or Ctrl+Alt+Shift+U (^U or ^⇧U on Mac OSX | M-^U or M-^L in curses) converts selected text to upper case letters or lower case letters respectively.

Change Indent Level

The amount of indentation for a selected set of lines is increased by pressing Tab ( on Mac OSX | Tab in curses) and decreased by pressing Shift+Tab (⇧⇥ | S-Tab). Whole lines do not have to be selected. As long as any part of a line is selected, the entire line is eligible for indenting/dedenting. Using these key sequences when no selection is present does not have the same effect.

Move Lines

Selected lines are moved with the Ctrl+Shift+Up and Ctrl+Shift+Down (^⇧⇡ and ^⇧⇣ on Mac OSX | S-^Up and S-^Down in curses) keys. Like with changing indent level, as long as any part of a line is selected, the entire line is eligible for moving.

Find & Replace

Ctrl+F (⌘F on Mac OSX | M-F or M-S-F in curses) brings up the Find & Replace pane. In addition to offering the usual find and replace with “Match Case” and “Whole Word” options and find/replace history, Textadept allows you to find with Lua patterns and replace with Lua captures and even Lua code! For example: replacing all (%w+) with %(string.upper('%1')) upper cases all words in the buffer. Lua captures (%n) are only available from a Lua pattern search, but embedded Lua code enclosed in %() is always allowed.

Note the Ctrl+G, Ctrl+Shift+G, Ctrl+Alt+R, Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R key bindings for find next, find previous, replace, and replace all (⌘G, ⌘⇧G, ^R, ^⇧R respectively on Mac OSX | M-G, M-S-G, M-R, M-S-R in curses) only work when the Find & Replace pane is hidden. When the pane is visible in the GUI version, use the button mnemonics: Alt+N, Alt+P, Alt+R, and Alt+A (⌘N, ⌘P, ⌘R, ⌘A | N/A) for English locale.

In the curses version, Tab and S-Tab toggles between the find next, find previous, replace, and replace all buttons; Up and Down arrows switch between the find and replace text fields; ^P and ^N cycles through history; and F1-F4 toggles find options.

Pressing Esc ( | Esc) hides the pane when you are finished.

Replace in Selection

By default, “Replace All” replaces all text in the buffer. If you want to replace all text in just a portion of the buffer, select a block of text and then “Replace All”.

Find in Files

Ctrl+Shift+F brings up Find in Files (⌘⇧F on Mac OSX | none in curses) and will prompt for a directory to search. The results are displayed in a new buffer. Double-clicking a search result jumps to it in the file. You can also use the Ctrl+Alt+G and Ctrl+Alt+Shift+G (^⌘G and ^⌘⇧G | none) key bindings. Replace in Files is not supported. You will have to “Find in Files” first, and then “Replace All” for each file a result is found in. The “Match Case”, “Whole Word”, and “Lua pattern” flags still apply.

Warning: currently, the only way to specify a file-type filter is through the find API and even though the default filter excludes common binary files and version control folders from searches, Find in Files could still scan unrecognized binary files or large, unwanted sub-directories. Searches also block Textadept from receiving additional input, making the interface temporarily unresponsive. Searching large directories or projects can be very time consuming and frustrating, so using a specialized, external tool such as ack is recommended.

Find in Files

Incremental Find

You can start an incremental search by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F (^⌘F on Mac OSX | M-^F in curses). Incremental search searches the buffer as you type. Only the “Match Case” option is recognized. Pressing Esc ( | Esc) stops the search.

Source Code Editing

Textadept would not be a programmer’s editor without some features for editing source code. Textadept understands the syntax and structure of more than 80 different programming languages and recognizes hundreds of file types. It uses this knowledge to make viewing and editing code faster and easier.

Lexers

When you open a file, chances are that Textadept will identify the programming language associated with that file and set a “lexer” to highlight syntactic elements of the code. You can set or change the lexer manually by pressing Ctrl+Shift+L (⌘⇧L on Mac OSX | M-S-L in curses) and selecting a lexer from the list. You can customize how Textadept recognizes files in your file type preferences.

Lexers can sometimes lose track of their context while you are editing and highlight syntax incorrectly. Pressing F5 triggers a full redraw.

Code Folding

Some lexers support “code folding”, where blocks of code can be temporarily hidden, making viewing easier. Fold points are denoted by arrows in the margin to the left of the code. Clicking on one toggles the folding for that block of code. You can also press Ctrl+* (⌘* on Mac OSX | M-* in curses) to toggle the fold point on the current line.

Folding

Word Highlight

All occurrences of a given word are highlighted by putting the caret over the word and pressing Ctrl+Alt+Shift+H (⌘⇧H on Mac OSX | N/A in curses). This is useful to show occurrences of a variable name, but is not limited to source code.

Word Highlight

Adeptsense

Textadept has the capability to autocomplete symbols for programming languages and display API documentation. Symbol completion is available by pressing Ctrl+Space (⌥⎋ on Mac OSX | ^Space in curses). Documentation for symbols is available with Ctrl+H (^H | M-H or M-S-H). Note: In order for this feature to work, the language you are working with must have an Adeptsense defined. Language-specific modules usually define Adeptsenses. All of the official Textadept language-specific modules have Adeptsenses.

Adeptsense Lua      Adeptsense Lua String

Adeptsense Doc

Snippets

Snippets are essentially pieces of text inserted into a document. However, snippets are not limited to static text. They can be dynamic templates which contain placeholders for further user input, can mirror or transform those user inputs, and/or execute arbitrary code. Snippets are useful for rapidly constructing blocks of code such as control structures, method calls, and function declarations. Press Ctrl+K (⌥⇥ on Mac OSX | M-K in curses) for a list of available snippets. Snippets are composed of trigger word and snippet text. Instead of manually selecting a snippet, you can type its trigger word followed by the Tab ( | Tab) key. Subsequent presses of Tab ( | Tab) cause the caret to enter placeholders in sequential order, Shift+Tab (⇧⇥ | S-Tab) goes back to the previous placeholder, and Ctrl+Shift+K (⌥⇧⇥ | M-S-K) cancels the current snippet. Snippets can be nested (inserted from within another snippet) and are not limited to source code. Language-specific modules usually define snippets, but you can create your own custom snippets in your snippet preferences.

Snippet      Snippet Expanded

Toggle Comments

Pressing Ctrl+/ (⌘/ on Mac OSX | M-/ in curses) comments or uncomments the code on the selected lines. As long as any part of a line is selected, the entire line will be commented or uncommented. Note: In order for this feature to work, the language you are working with must have its comment prefix defined. Language-specific modules usually define prefixes, but it can also be done manually in your user-init file.