pragtical

Recently, I became more silent, without sharing much here in my Ko‑fi page. But that's not because I was not working on anything Amiga related. On the contrary. I worked on many different projects, like the gcc13 port for AmigaOS 4 which is already publicly available, fixing a couple of bugs on our gcc compilers, creating a newer experimental version of make 4.4.1, and developing a couple of other projects and that getting more mature and will be released in the future.

But today I would like to discuss the release of a new code editor called Pragtical v3.8.7, which I ported to AmigaOS 4.1 FE and MorphOS 3. If you check the screenshots, it will probably remind you another editor I previously ported, called Lite XL. And you wouldn't be wrong, as Pragtical is a fork of Lite XL, but with an entirely different perspective. As the development team mention at the official website:

Originally, Pragtical was forked from Lite XL (which is also a fork of lite) with a focus on being practical rather than minimalist. Over time, it has gained its own identity with various features and improvements not available in its predecessors.

Pragtical remains a lightweight Lua based code editor, using SDL3, having a very flexible plugin system to extend its abilities. But at the same time, it comes with some default plugins that make it productive and easy to use out of the box. For example, you will see the full GUI it provides on project search, or the settings pages, or the inbuilt file encoding support.

Although it is a fork of Lite XL, my approach was to not base that port entirely on my previous work, but start from the scratch, cherry-picking the changes I needed, but also restructure parts. For example, a better mechanism was used to understand the file encoding, using uchardet library, which I had to port as well. Furthermore, parts of the code that had to do with threads and processes, monitoring and events, they needed to be implemented from the scratch, as they were never done in Lite XL.

This is the first release of mine, which I started a few months ago. That's why it is way behind the latest official release. But this one is well tested, and seems quite stable. But I would like to listen to your experience with it. I will keep working on it, to catch up with the latest official releases, as soon as possible.

Now, where can you find this new code editor? I have created a page in my project management system, where you can download the archives, see the roadmap, and read my future announcements. However, it will be uploaded to OS4Depot and MorphOS-storage soon.

I hope you will enjoy using Pragtical and all I can wish you is... Happy coding...