Contents

Compiling

Requirements

Unfortunately, the requirements for building Textadept are not quite as minimal as running it.

Linux and BSD

Linux systems need the GTK+ development libraries. Your package manager should allow you to install them. For Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu, the package is typically called libgtk2.0-dev. Otherwise, compile and install GTK from the GTK+ website. Additionally you will need the GNU C compiler (gcc) and GNU Make (make). Both should be available for your Linux distribution through its package manager. For example, Ubuntu includes these tools in the build-essential package.

Windows

Compiling Textadept on Windows is no longer supported. If you wish to do so however, you need a C compiler that supports the C99 standard (Microsoft’s does not) and the GTK+ for Windows bundle (2.22 is recommended).

The preferred way to compile for Windows is cross-compiling from Linux. To do so, in addition to the GTK bundle mentioned above, you need MinGW with the Windows header files. They should be available from your package manager.

Mac OSX

XCode is needed for Mac OSX as well as jhbuild. After building meta-gtk-osx-bootstrap and meta-gtk-osx-core, you need to build meta-gtk-osx-themes. Note that the entire compiling process can easily take 30 minutes or more and ultimately consume nearly 1GB of disk space.

Compiling

Make sure you downloaded the textadept_x.x.src.zip (regardless of what platform you are on) and not a platform-specific binary package.

Linux and BSD

For Linux systems, simply run make in the src/ directory. The textadept executable is created in the root directory. Make a symlink from it to /usr/bin/ or elsewhere in your PATH.

BSD users please run make BSD=1.

Cross Compiling for Windows

When cross-compiling from within Linux, first unzip the GTK+ for Windows bundle into a new src/win32gtk directory. Then modify the CC, CPP, and WINDRES variables in the WIN32 block of src/Makefile to match your MinGW installation and run make WIN32=1 to build ../textadept.exe.

Mac OSX

After using jhbuild, GTK is in ~/gtk so make a symlink from ~/gtk/inst to src/gtkosx in Textadept. Then run make OSX=1 to build ../textadept.osx. At this point it is recommended to build a new Textadept.app from an existing one. Download the most recent app and replace Contents/MacOS/textadept.osx, all .dylib files in Contents/Resources/lib, and all .so files in Contents/Resources/lib/gtk-2.0/<version>/{engines,immodules,loaders} with your own versions in src/gtkosx/lib. If you wish, you may also replace the files in Contents/Resources/{etc,share}, but these rarely change.

Problems

If the build fails because of a

`redefinition of 'struct Sci_TextRange'`

error, open src/scintilla/include/Scintilla.h and comment out the following lines (put // at the start of the line):

#define CharacterRange Sci_CharacterRange
#define TextRange Sci_TextRange
#define TextToFind Sci_TextToFind

Compiling with LuaJIT

LuaJIT is a Just-In-Time Compiler for Lua and can boost the speed of Lua programs. I have noticed that syntax highlighting can be up to 2 times faster with LuaJIT than with vanilla Lua. This difference is largely unnoticable on modern computers and usually only discernable when initially loading large files. Other than syntax highlighting, LuaJIT offers no real benefit performance-wise to justify it being Textadept’s default runtime. LuaJIT’s ffi library, however, appears to be useful for interfacing with external, non-Lua, libraries.

You can compile Textadept with LuaJIT by running make LUAJIT=1 for Linux systems, make OSX=1 LUAJIT=1 for Mac OSX, and make WIN32=1 LUAJIT=1 for Windows systems.

Please note that a lua51.dll is produced for Windows platforms because limitations on external Lua library loading do not allow statically linking LuaJIT to Textadept. Static linking occurs on all other platforms.