Contents

Working with Files

Lack of Tabs

One of the first things you will notice when opening multiple files in Textadept is that there is no tab bar showing the files that are open. This was a design decision. Textadept was built to support unlimited split views, so having a tab bar with all open buffers would clutter the interface greatly. There is also the question of where to place the bar (above, below, or to one side) and how many to have (one for each split view or a single one under the menubar).

You can see which buffer is active by looking at Textadept’s titlebar. Pressing Ctrl+Tab (^⇥ on Mac OSX) cycles to the next buffer and Ctrl+Shift+Tab (^⇧⇥) cycles to the previous one.

Buffer Browser

To move quickly between buffers, press Ctrl+B (⌘B on Mac OSX) to open the buffer browser.

Buffer Browser

The buffer browser shows you a list of currently open buffers, the most recent towards the bottom. Typing part of any filename filters the list. Spaces are wildcards. You can also just use the arrow keys. Pressing Enter or clicking OK switches to the selected buffer.

Buffer Browser Filtered

Split Views

Textadept allows you to split the editor window as many times as you like either horizontally or vertically. Ctrl+Alt+S or Ctrl+Alt+H splits horizontally (top-bottom) and Ctrl+Alt+V splits vertically (^S and ^V respectively on Mac OSX). You can resize the splitter bar by clicking and dragging with the mouse or using Ctrl+Alt++ and Ctrl+Alt+- (^+ and ^-). The same file can be worked with in multiple split views.

Pressing Ctrl+Alt+N (^⌥⇥ on Mac OSX) goes to the next view and Ctrl+Alt+P (^⌥⇧⇥) goes to the previous one.

To unsplit a view, enter the view to keep open and press Ctrl+Alt+W (^W on Mac OSX). To unsplit all views, use Ctrl+Alt+Shift+W (^⇧W).

Sessions

By default, Textadept saves the list of open buffers on exit so it can reload them the next time it starts up. You can disable this by passing the -n or --no-session switch to Textadept on startup. Sessions can be manually saved and opened via the File -> Save Session... and File -> Load Session... menus.

Sessions save additional information such as current split views, caret and scroll positions in each buffer, Textadept’s window size, and recently opened files.

Snapopen

A quicker, though slightly more limited alternative to the standard File -> Open dialog is snapopen. It behaves like the buffer browser, but displays a list of files to open, including files in subdirectories. You can snapopen the current file’s directory with Ctrl+Alt+Shift+O (^⌘⇧O on Mac OSX) or from the Tools -> Snapopen -> Current Directory menu. Snapopen is pretty limited from the menu, but more versatile in scripts. See its LuaDoc. Ctrl+U (⌘U) snaps open ~/.textadept/.

Snapopen