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Themes

Textadept’s look and feel can be customized with themes. The themes that come with Textadept are light and dark‘. By default the light theme is used. To change the theme, create a ~/.textadept/theme file whose first line of text is the name of the theme you would like to use.

Light Theme      Dark Theme

Themes apply to all buffers. You cannot assign a theme to a particular file or filetype. You can change things like tab and indent settings per filetype however by creating a language-specific module.

Creating or Modifying Themes

Each theme is a single folder on the filesystem composed of three files: lexer.lua, buffer.lua, and view.lua. It is recommended to put themes in your ~/.textadept/themes/ directory so they will not be overwritten when you update Textadept. Themes in that directory override any themes in Textadept’s themes/ directory. This means that if you have your own light theme, it will be loaded instead of the one that comes with Textadept.

To use a theme not located in ~/.textadept/themes/ or Textadept’s themes/ directory, you need to specify an absolute path to the theme’s folder in your ~/.textadept/theme file.

Lexer

Textadept uses lexers to assign names to buffer elements like comments, strings, and keywords. These elements are assigned styles composed of font and color information in the theme’s lexer.lua. See the Styling Tokens section of the lexer page for more information on how to create styles and colors.

Buffer

buffer.lua contains buffer-specific properties like indentation size and whether or not to use tabs. For example, to set the default tab size to 4 and use tabs:

buffer.tab_width = 4
buffer.use_tabs = true
buffer.indent = 4

See the LuaDoc for documentation on the properties.

View

view.lua contains view-specific properties like caret and selection colors. See the LuaDoc for documentation on the properties.

Testing Themes

You can reload or switch between themes on the fly using Ctrl+Shift+T (⌘⇧T on Mac OSX), but be aware that the Scintilla views do not reset themselves, so any options set explicitly in the previous theme’s view.lua file that are not set explicitly in the new theme will carry over. The switch feature is intended primarily for theme exploration and/or development and can be slow when many buffers or views are open.

Any errors that occur in the theme are printed to io.stderr.

Theming the GUI

There is no way to theme GUI controls like text fields and buttons from within Textadept. Instead, use GTK Resource files. The GtkWindow name is textadept. For example, styling all text fields with a "textadept-entry-style" would be done like this:

widget "textadept*GtkEntry*" style "textadept-entry-style"

Getting Themes

For now, user-created themes are obtained from the wiki. The classic dark, light, and scite themes prior to version 4.3 have been moved there.