The Nerd Show

SciTE Editor, IDE

Are calltips, keyword highlighting and auto-completion not working?

Download Linux configuration files for SciTE.

The SciTE editor makes a very good IDE, not just because of all the features but also because of its speed and small size. At only 1.8 MB, SciTE loads extremely fast. We used SciTE along with TML to create this website. For busy programmers and editors those few extra seconds count! Being able to jot things down quickly can mean the difference between submitting a project on time and missing a crucial deadline. SciTE uses many standard libraries which on most systems are already loaded in memory.

There are many user-configured extensions and add-ons for SciTE. Everything about the interface is customizable with Lua scripting and there is plenty of API documentation available on the SciTE website. There are several utilities, games and even a hex editor written entirely in SciTE using the Lua extensions. Read more about extending SciTE here and here.

To be fair, there are some things that SciTE lacks compared with it's larger cousins, such as Eclipse or the NetBeans IDE. One of the most requested items is a file browser. If this bothers you just press F8 and type 'dir' in the output pane. (ls Linux) Now you may highlight any file and press CTRL-SHIFT-O to open it. It's just about as good and more versatile, since you can also type commands and see program output and man pages in that panel. See? Press F8 to close it again.

Calltips, keyword highlighting and auto-completion are very handy. What we think makes SciTE really great, however, are the column selection and editing. This is invaluable for programmers. (We work with a lot of data!) With column selection we can edit multiple lines and even type many commands at the same time! (Update: Many other editors can now do this. Some of them, such as Notepad+, use the same Scintilla engine that SciTE does.) Take a look at the video for a demonstration SciTE's column editing features. Best of all, SciTE is free and open source. You can get it here.

SciTE Tips

Linux configuration adapted from: http:groups.google.com/group/scite-interest/web/extras

Windows users: Use the above google groups link configuration files. They are mostly for Windows.