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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:

  1. <directory_to_pragtical_binary>/user
  2. $PRAGTICAL_USERDIR
  3. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/pragtical
  4. $HOME/.config/pragtical or $USERPROFILE/.config/pragtical on 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:

PluginUse case
align_caretsAlign text on multiple carets and selections
autoinsertAutomatically insert closing brackets and quotes
autosaveAutomatically saves the file when it is modified
bracketmatchHighlight matching brackets
editorconfigEditorConfig support for Pragtical
ephemeral_tabsEphemeral tabs (previewing files without creating multiple tabs)
indentguideIndent guides
lint+Linter support
lspLanguage Server support for Pragtical
minimapMinimap
selectionhighlightHighlight code that matches the selection
scmAll 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: