Lite XL
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Lite XL is a lightweight text editor written mostly in Lua — it aims to provide something practical, pretty, small and fast, implemented as simply as possible; easy to modify and extend, or to use without doing either.
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- bnchndlr liked Lite XL
Maoholguin added Lite XL as alternative to Windsurf Editor
Lite XL information
Developed by
UnknownLicensing
Open Source (MIT) and Free product.Written in
Rating
Average rating of 4.6Alternatives
53 alternatives listedSupported Languages
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Development, Office & ProductivityGitHub repository
- 5,355 Stars
- 255 Forks
- 269 Open Issues
- Updated May 8, 2025
Comments and Reviews
Finally. A simple to assimilate IDE, which is actually lite and resources, and isn't just another electron-based one.
Lightweight and fast, but too many of its features are hidden behind shortcut keys which cannot be accessed/learned by going through a menu. Some common features are also kinda broken (e.g. regex search automatically escapes backslashes, preventing searches for e.g. 'nul' (\0), etc).
It's fine to have shortcuts. Just make there also be a menu. Or an option for a menu. Bonus points for having the menu say what the shortcut is so that I can learn it by doing the thing, without it actually slowing me down by making me go to the website to hopefully figure it out, on the off chance that it's not just a feature you don't have.
In the page that's visible when there are no files open you can find a few of the most important shortcuts, like opening a file or a directory. There is also the shortcut to open the command palette. From the command palette you can search all the available commands, and on the right you can see the shortcuts to execute them.
Regarding your issue with search, keep in mind that regex isn't enabled by default, so you need to toggle it with the shortcut that's shown just under the search box. With regex enabled I'm able to search for things like \t and \n without any problem.
Excellent text editor. Launches quickly, has good plugins, and quite easy to configure.
A solid 5 stars. What a badass little editor. Starts up in a couple of milliseconds. Portable. Customizable. Super easy to grok (understand) and surprisingly feature-rich, especially given its size ... a whopping 3 MB download as of this writing.
It sports extremely fast file & text search (yes, fuzzy search that's smarter than the average run-of-the-mill crap search in other programs). And the Autocomplete, that would even let you complete after 1 character (not sure if recommended but that's I like and I haven't noticed any kind of lag whatsoever, but as a disclaimer I haven't tried it with larger files yet).
Another great, great feature is the split-screening! You'll notice a lot of usability-thought went into the app, such as split-screen where it's as easy as dragging tabs around. Yes, that's mouse-dragging – not some arcane Vim or Emacs malarkey, however that's probably possible to set up if Vim/Emacs mnemonics is your cup of tea.
I'd even place this app in the rarest, most commendable category, "micro-sized powerhouse that somehow also manages to blow the competition in terms of functionality" – right there next to gems like Blender and the Reaper DAW.
lightweight + portable + distraction free (vscode pretty good alternative)
I'm using it for fast, single-file edit - when there's no need for opening a project in heavy VSCodium.
Very lightweight and speedy, a joy to use.