FAQ
Why Lite XL?
Lite XL is a fork of lite, an amazing text editor by rxi. Francesco forked lite to add sub-pixel font rendering, which significantly improves how text looks but brings in huge dependencies (FreeType and AGG) and complicates text rendering. This change was rejected by rxi as lite values simplicity.
Eventually, more and more features are added to Lite XL while lite is considered feature complete and only allows bug fixes. Lite XL grew to have slightly different API than lite to support various use cases, such as multiline editing, regular expressions and subsyntaxes.
Where to find plugins and install them?
You can find a list of plugins at our plugin repository.
To install them, you can use LPM. Check out the guide here for more instructions.
Is there an easier way to configure Lite XL without learning Lua?
Yes, since v2.1.0 we provide an extended package with
additional plugins which provides a GUI for configuring Lite XL.
The packages are prefixed with lite-xl-(version)-addons
(e.g. lite-xl-v2.1.0-addons-windows-x86_64.zip).
Can I get smart autocompletion (Intellisense/LSP)?
Check out the LSP plugin.
Where is the integrated terminal?
You can install lite-xl-terminal.
Tabs and indent size?
In your user config (the cog icon in the file tree):
config.tab_type = "soft" -- soft for spaces, hard for real tabs (\t)
config.indent_size = 4 -- 4 spaces
How to enable line wrapping?
Since v2.1.0, you can enable line wrapping by pressing F10. Before v2.1.0, only hard wrapping is supported via autowrap.
How to bind commands to keys?
How to unbind commands for certain keys?
-- the second parameter lets you override commands for certain keys
-- in this case it maps it to nothing
keymap.add({ ["ctrl+escape"] = {} }, true)
How to get commands for those keybinds?
You can search for commands in the command palette.
For each command, replace the spaces on the right side with dashes.
For example: Core: Find Command → core:find-command
What version of Lua does Lite XL use?
Lua 5.4 since v2.1.0 and Lua 5.4.2 before v2.1.0. There's some activity around using LuaJIT instead (which is 5.1) but it can provide some Lua 5.2 compatibility. Ongoing work is being done to maintain compatibility between LuaJIT and Lua 5.4, but this is not officially supported.
Vim mode?
You need to vibe.