Getting Started
Setting up Pragtical is easy.
Pragtical comes in .zip or .tar.gz packages and installers
depending on the platform.
Install
Installing Pragtical is usually as simple as downloading the package and extracting it. However, here are some platform-specific installation instructions.
Portable application
Pragtical stores user configuration in the OS-specific configuration directory.
This directory is also known as USERDIR.
These paths are checked to determine USERDIR:
<directory_to_pragtical_binary>/user$PRAGTICAL_USERDIR$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/pragtical$HOME/.config/pragticalor$USERPROFILE/.config/pragticalon Windows
In order to create a portable installation of Pragtical,
you can create a user directory where the executable resides.
Pragtical will then store configuration data in that directory.
Plugins
Pragtical can be extended via plugins written in Lua. In fact, most of Pragtical's features comes from plugins; the core is kept simple and features are added via plugins if possible.
Pragtical comes with a set of plugins and users can install more on their own. Here are common plugins that most users install:
| Plugin | Use case |
|---|---|
| align_carets | Align text on multiple carets and selections |
| autoinsert | Automatically insert closing brackets and quotes |
| autosave | Automatically saves the file when it is modified |
| bracketmatch | Highlight matching brackets |
| editorconfig | EditorConfig support for Pragtical |
| ephemeral_tabs | Ephemeral tabs (previewing files without creating multiple tabs) |
| indentguide | Indent guides |
| lint+ | Linter support |
| lsp | Language Server support for Pragtical |
| minimap | Minimap |
| selectionhighlight | Highlight code that matches the selection |
| scm | All in one source control management |
Further reading
You may be interested on these topics:
- Introduction — A introduction to various Pragtical features and concepts.
- Configuration — A guide on how to configure Pragtical.
- Plugins — An introduction to plugin management.
These are advanced topics that are useful for power users or plugin developers:
- Creating Themes — A tutorial on how to write themes for Pragtical.
- Creating Syntaxes — A guide on how to add support for new languages.
- Simple plugin — A tutorial on writing a simple plugin.
- Regular expressions — A guide on how to use regular expressions in Pragtical.
- Child processes — A guide on how to start and manage child processes.