Scintilla is a free, open source

library A library is a collection of materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location or a vir ...

that provides a text editing component function, with an emphasis on advanced features for source code editing.

Features

Scintilla supports many features to make code editing easier in addition to

syntax highlighting Syntax highlighting is a feature of text editors that are used for programming, scripting, or markup languages, such as HTML. The feature displays text, especially source code, in different colours and fonts according to the category of terms ...

. The highlighting method allows the use of different fonts, colors, styles and background colors, and is not limited to fixed-width fonts. The control supports error indicators, line numbering in the margin, as well as line markers such as code

breakpoint In software development, a breakpoint is an intentional stopping or pausing place in a program, put in place for debugging purposes. It is also sometimes simply referred to as a pause. More generally, a breakpoint is a means of acquiring know ...

s. Other features such as

code folding Code or text folding, or less commonly holophrasting, is a feature of some graphical user interfaces that allows the user to selectively hide ("fold") or display ("unfold") parts of a document. This allows the user to manage large amounts of tex ...

and

autocompletion Autocomplete, or word completion, is a feature in which an application predicts the rest of a word a user is typing. In Android and iOS smartphones, this is called predictive text. In graphical user interfaces, users can typically press the tab ...

can be added. The basic

regular expression A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; sometimes referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" ...

search implementation is rudimentary, but if compiled with

C++11 C++11 is a version of the ISO/ IEC 14882 standard for the C++ programming language. C++11 replaced the prior version of the C++ standard, called C++03, and was later replaced by C++14. The name follows the tradition of naming language versions b ...

support Scintilla can support the runtime's regular expression engine. Scintilla's regular expression library can also be replaced or avoided with direct buffer access. Currently, Scintilla has experimental support for

right-to-left In a script (commonly shortened to right to left or abbreviated RTL, RL-TB or R2L), writing starts from the right of the page and continues to the left, proceeding from top to bottom for new lines. Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Pashto, Urdu, Kashmir ...

languages. Scinterm is a version of Scintilla for the

curses A curse (also called an imprecation, malediction, execration, malison, anathema, or commination) is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to one or more persons, a place, or an object. In particular ...

text user interface In computing, text-based user interfaces (TUI) (alternately terminal user interfaces, to reflect a dependence upon the properties of computer terminals and not just text), is a retronym describing a type of user interface (UI) common as an ear ...

. It is written by the developer of the

Textadept Textadept is a free software minimalist text editor designed for computer programming. Distributed under the MIT license, it is written in C and Lua and is extensible using Lua. Textadept can use either a graphical user interface or a text-based ...

editor. Scinterm uses

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

characters to support some of Scintilla's graphically oriented features, but some Scintilla features are missing because of the terminal environment's constraints.

Other versions

* ScintillaNET – a wrapper for use on the

.NET Framework The .NET Framework (pronounced as "''dot net"'') is a proprietary software framework developed by Microsoft that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It was the predominant implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) until bein ...

* QScintilla – Qt port of Scintilla * wxScintilla – wxWidgets-wrapper for Scintilla * wxStyledTextCtrl – class acting as a wrapper for Scintilla in the

wxWidgets wxWidgets (formerly wxWindows) is a widget toolkit and tools library for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for cross-platform applications. wxWidgets enables a program's GUI code to compile and run on several computer platforms with mini ...

toolkit * CsScintilla - CopperSpice port of Scintilla * Delphi wrappers: ** TScintEdit – part of Inno Setup. ** TDScintilla – simple wrapper for all methods of Scintilla. ** TScintilla – Delphi Scintilla Interface Component (as of 2009-09-02, this project is no longer under active development).

Features

Other versions

Software based on Scintilla

References

External links