FAQ
Why Lite XL?
Lite XL is a fork of lite, an amazing text editor by rxi. Francesco forked lite to add sub-pixel font rendering, which significantly improves how text looks but brings in huge dependencies (FreeType and AGG) and complicates text rendering. This change was rejected by rxi as lite values simplicity.
Eventually, more and more features are added to Lite XL while lite is considered feature complete and only allows bug fixes. Lite XL grew to have slightly different API than lite to support various use cases, such as multiline editing, regular expressions and subsyntaxes.
Where to find plugins and install them?
You can find a list of plugins at our plugin repository.
To install them, you can use LPM. Check out the guide here for more instructions.
Is there an easier way to configure Lite XL without learning Lua?
Yes, since v2.1.0 we provide an extended package with additional plugins which provides a GUI for configuring Lite XL. The packages are prefixed with lite-xl-(version)-addons
(e.g. lite-xl-v2.1.0-addons-windows-x86_64.zip).
Can I get smart autocompletion (Intellisense/LSP)?
Check out the LSP plugin.
Where is the integrated terminal?
You can install lite-xl-terminal.
Tabs and indent size?
In your user config (the cog icon in the file tree):
config.tab_type = "soft" -- soft for spaces, hard for real tabs (\t)
config.indent_size = 4 -- 4 spaces
How to enable line wrapping?
Since v2.1.0, you can enable line wrapping by pressing F10. Before v2.1.0, only hard wrapping is supported via autowrap.
How to bind commands to keys?
How to unbind commands for certain keys?
-- the second parameter lets you override commands for certain keys
-- in this case it maps it to nothing
keymap.add({ ["ctrl+escape"] = {} }, true)
How to get commands for those keybinds?
You can search for commands in the command palette.
For each command, replace the spaces with dashes.
For example: Core: Find Command → core:find-command
Lite XL doesn't look right on my monitor!
This is a known issue with Lite XL as it uses SDL2, which has issues inferring the correct DPI on different platforms. Common symptoms are:
Text too large / small
This issue is caused by Lite XL defaulting to the scale factor of 1. You can change the default scale with the scale plugin, which comes bundled with all Lite XL installations.
The scale plugin support scaling only the code editor or all UI elements. To change this setting, you can use the following steps:
The scale plugin reads the mode and default scale in config.plugins.scale on startup. In your user module, add the following lines:
To change the scale, navigate to the "Plugins" tab and expand the "Scale" section. Select "Everything" for the "Mode" dropdown and choose a default scaling factor that suits your monitor. The changes will apply on editor restart.
Text is blurry
This issue is commonly faced on Windows with displays of different scaling factors, and the main display has a lower scaling factor than the other. This is because Lite XL is only system API aware instead of per-monitor DPI aware.
Currently, there are no fixes for this issue. It will be fixed when Lite XL eventually adopts SDL3 and handles DPI changes correctly.
What version of Lua does Lite XL use?
Lua 5.4, since v2.1.0, released in late 2022.
Lite XL used Lua 5.2 before v2.1.0.
Vim mode?
You need to vibe.