ted

A text editor.

Installers for ted for Windows and Debian/Ubuntu can be found on ted's homepage.

Why?

There are a lot of text editors out there. ted doesn't do anything new. Here are some benefits of ted:

• Starts up immediately.
• Doesn't lag for reasonably-sized files.
• VERY small - a full ted installation is < 5 MB.

ted isn't incredibly complicated, but it does have some nice features you might not find in other editors.

Supported features

• Customization of (pretty much) all colors and keyboard commands.
• Basic text editing like copy+paste, undo+redo, etc.
• Multiple tabs, each with a different file
• Split screen
• Auto-indent
• Syntax highlighting for C, C++, C#, CSS, GdScript, GLSL, Go, HTML, Java, JavaScript, LaTeX, Markdown, Python, Rust, and TypeScript.
• Find and replace (with regular expressions!)
• Run build command, go to errors
• Run any shell command
• Autocomplete
• Go to definition
• Go to line number
• Indent/dedent selection, comment/uncomment selection
• Keyboard macros

Guide

For how to use ted, see GUIDE.md.

Building from source

Download ted's source tree with the link above or

git clone --recursive https://cgit.pommicket.com/ted.git

If you didn't use the command above, run git submodule update --init --recursive to download ted’s dependencies.

To install ted from source on Linux, you will also need:

• A C compiler
• The SDL3 development libraries
• cmake
• imagemagick convert (for creating the .deb installer)

These can be installed on Ubuntu/Debian with:

sudo apt install clang libsdl3-dev cmake imagemagick

Then run make -j ted.release to build then sudo make install to install. You can also run make -j ted.deb to build the .deb installer. If your operating system is old enough that it doesn’t have an SDL3 package, you can also build a version with SDL3 statically linked in, using make -j ted-static-sdl.release, then install with sudo make install-ted-static-sdl.

This installs ted for all users. If you just want to install it for yourself (or you don't have superuser access), you can do so with

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin ~/.local/share
GLOBAL_DATA_DIR='~/.local/share/ted-data' LOCAL_DATA_DIR='~/.local/share/ted' INSTALL_BIN_DIR='~/.local/bin' make install -j

On Windows, install Microsoft Visual Studio 2026, then find and add vcvarsall.bat to your PATH (most likely lives at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2026\Community\VC\Auxiliary\Build). Also, install the Visual Studio Installer Projects extension (needed to build the .msi installer).

Next you will need the SDL3 VC development libraries: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/releases (named SDL3-devel-3.x.y-VC.zip; you might have to click "show all assets"). Extract the zip, copy SDL3-3.x.y into the ted directory, and rename it to SDL3. Also copy SDL3\lib\x64\SDL3.dll to the ted directory. Then run make.bat release.

License

ted is in the public domain (see LICENSE.txt).

Reporting bugs

You can report a bug by sending an email to pommicket at pommicket.com or by creating an issue on GitHub.

If ted is crashing on startup try doing these things as temporary fixes:

• Delete ~/.local/share/ted/session.txt or C:\Users\<your user name>\AppData\Local\ted\session.txt
• Reset your ted configuration by moving ted.cfg somewhere else.