Mode Development
Text Forge have a powerful and feature rich API to add support for any language in the fastest way. We provide modes to help developers and users work with any file just with plug one module. In this page, we will show a standard way for mode development to you and best practices.
Note
Reading Modes Guide is highly recommended before develop modes, please read that document before this.
Text Forge Mode API
To handle external modules we need an API, so we provide Text Forge Mode API (TFM API in short) as modes' connection way. TFM is a feature packed API for any mode, so it have a lot of features.
Note
We have multiple versions of TFM API, and each editor version just supports one TFM API version (but a TFM API version can be shared between a lot of versions). Latest TFM API version is 2.0 currently and this version supports Text Forge 0.1-stable and newer versions.
To use all features of modes, you should know about its API, so we will explain it a little more. TFM API consists of
two parts, the first part is in EditorAPI that connect editor to modes, the second part is the TextForgeMode class,
which keeps this connection standard and provides some ready-made features.
You will work with TextForgeMode to complete your mode, this will define your mode and EditorAPI will do the rest. So a mode have a very important part, its script. This script extends TextForgeMode class and customizes behaviors to provide your mode logic.
Make your first mode with template
We provide a mode template to help mode developers, specially for first time testing. You can find it here, you can download, clone or fork it to have a simple initialization, you can find guides in template.
Useful examples
You can see our official modes like Web Mode Kit and GDScript Mode to find solutions for most important challenges.