ta-config/patches

Why patches

Textadept is incredibly small, in terms of source size, for such a feature rich text editor. The project is committed to keep it under 2000 lines. This is great, but there had to be some sacrifices to keep it within that range. There are some features not available in the code. (The features are indicated in the project README.md file.) Implementing those features would require you to change TextAdept's source code and compile. There is a patch file to make this easier, and following the instructions in this page should get you up and running in no time!

By the way, this is optional. I will try to keep this project in such a way so that it works without these patches (in that case it would continue without certain features).

How to apply patch and compile

Compiling Textadept from source is very easy and doesn't take long.

1. Download the source from https://github.com/rgieseke/textadept/releases or from Textadept website. In case you want the latest release version from Textadept website, go under tags and choose a non-beta version, click files beside it, then click zip.

2. Copy the patch file from this directory to the main source directory (the same directory where the src folder is.)

3. Open a terminal on that directory and run:

patch -p2 -i changes.patch

4. Install dependencies:

On Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S make autoconf automake gettext libtool clang gtk2 wget pkgconfig

On Debian

sudo apt install automake gettext libtool clang libgtk2.0-dev

5. Open the terminal on src directory and run:

make clean-deps
make deps
make
sudo make install

This should install the patched version of Textadept with the extra features.

Troubleshooting

Textadept is not visible on applications menu

sudo cp *.desktop /usr/share/applications/

Running Textadept shows cannot open /usr/local/share/textadept/core/init.lua: Permission denied

On Arch Linux you may see a message saying cannot open /usr/local/share/textadept/core/init.lua: Permission denied when TextAdept is run. This was the case for some older versions of TA, but since been fixed. If you still face this, it can be solved by running:

sudo chmod -R 755 /usr/local/share/textadept/core && sudo chmod -R 755 /usr/local/share/textadept/modules