Textadept
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Contents
Advanced
Command Entry
Access to the Lua state is available through the command entry. Press Ctrl+E
(⌘E
on Mac OSX | M-C
in curses) to access it. It is useful for debugging,
inspecting, and entering buffer
or view
commands. If you try to cause
instability in Textadept’s Lua state, you might very well succeed so be careful.
For available commands, see the Lua API. Abbreviated commands for
buffer
, view
and gui
are available: the command
buffer:append_text('foo')
can be shortened to append_text('foo')
. Therefore,
use _G.print()
for Lua’s print()
since gui.print()
is shortened to
print()
. You can also run commands on startup using the -e
and --execute
command line switches.
Tab Completion
Tab-completion for functions, variables, tables, etc. is available. Press the
Tab
(⇥
on Mac OSX | Tab
in curses) key to display a list of available
completions. Use the arrow keys to make a selection and press Enter
(↩
|
Enter
) to insert it.
Extending
You can extend the command entry to do more than enter Lua commands. An example of this is incremental search. See modules/textadept/find.lua and modules/textadept/keys.lua for the implementation.
Command Selection
If you did not disable the menu in your preferences, then pressing
Ctrl+Shift+E
(⌘⇧E
on Mac OSX | M-S-C
in curses) brings up the command
selection dialog. Typing part of any command filters the list, with spaces being
wildcards. This is an easy way to run commands without navigating the menus,
using the mouse, or remembering key bindings. It is also useful for looking up
particular key bindings quickly. Note: the key bindings in the dialog do not
look like those in the menu. This different notation is how bindings are
represented internally. You can learn more about this in the keys LuaDoc.
Shell Commands and Filtering Text
Sometimes it is easier to use an existing shell command to manipulate text instead of using the command entry. An example would be sorting all text in a buffer (or a selection). You could do the following from the command entry:
ls={}; for l in buffer:get_text():gmatch('[^\n]+') do ls[#ls+1]=l end;
table.sort(ls); buffer:set_text(table.concat(ls, '\n'))
A simpler way would be to press Ctrl+|
(⌘|
on Mac OSX | ^\
in curses),
enter the shell command sort
, and hit Enter
(↩
| Enter
).
The standard input (stdin) for shell commands is determined as follows:
- If text is selected and spans multiple lines, all text on the lines containing the selection is used. However, if the end of the selection is at the beginning of a line, only the EOL (end of line) characters from the previous line are included as input. The rest of the line is excluded.
- If text is selected and spans a single line, only the selected text is used.
- If no text is selected, the entire buffer is used.
The input text is replaced with the standard output (stdout) of the command.
Remote Control
Since Textadept can execute arbitrary Lua code passed via the -e
and
--execute
command line switches, a side-effect of single instance
functionality on the platforms that support it is that you can remotely control
the original instance. For example:
ta ~/.textadept/init.lua &
ta -e "events.emit(events.FIND, 'require')"