scintillating（Scintilla and SciTE）

Scintilla is a free source code editing component.

It comes with complete source code and a license that

permits use in any free project or commercial product.

As well as features found in standard text editing components, Scintilla includes features

especially useful when editing and debugging source code.

These include support for syntax styling, error indicators, code completion and call tips.

The selection margin can contain markers like those used in debuggers to indicate

breakpoints and the current line. Styling choices are more open than with many editors,

allowing the use of proportional fonts, bold and italics, multiple foreground and background

colours and multiple fonts.

SciTE is a SCIntilla based Text Editor. Originally built to

demonstrate Scintilla, it has grown to be a generally useful editor with facilities for

building and running programs. It is best used for jobs with simple configurations - I use it

for building test and demonstration programs as well as SciTE and Scintilla, themselves.

Development of Scintilla started as an effort to improve the text editor in PythonWin. After

being frustrated by problems in the Richedit control used by PythonWin, it looked like the

best way forward was to write a new edit control. The biggest problem with Richedit and other

similar controls is that they treat styling changes as important persistent changes to the

document so they are saved into the undo stack and set the documents dirty flag. For source

code, styling should not be persisted as it can be mechanically recreated.

Scintilla and SciTE are currently available for Intel Win32 and Linux compatible operating

systems with GTK+. They have been run on Windows XP, Windows 7, and on Ubuntu 10.10

with GTK+ 2.20. Here is a screenshot of

SciTE.