Setup

Text Forge currently supports Linux and Windows (You can use it on other platforms with build it from source), Just download latest and install it! (or download portable version and extract it anywhere you want)

Now you can run Text Forge:

Install Modes

Now, you have a very lightweight editor, it's more like a core. There is a lot of plugged modules like action scripts, panel, etc. but you need another type of module too for work with you editor. This type is Mode, you can find more about modes here, but for now let's get your modes from official mode library!

Download Modes or Standard Package

You can go here and download modes you want, instead if you like have a standard collection of modes you can use Standard Package (You can read more about packages here), to get this package you should navigate to this section in packages list and click on Standard to download package file.

Then, you have a .zip file, you should extract it in modes/ directory in your editor root folder like this:

Text Forge/
    modes/
        # A folder for each mode, like:
        html/
        css/
        python/

Open A File

You have a ready code editor! Let's open a file:

• In top left of editor you have a list of menus. Click on File menu in top left.
• Click on Open and select you file from opened file dialog.
• Based on your file type (extension), Text Forge will open it in one of these ways:
  1. You have one installed mode for this file: Here, Text Forge will use mode to load file in editor and loads syntax highlighter from mode.
  2. You have some installed mode for this file: A popup will show, and you can select a mode to open file, then we have first situation.
  3. You haven't any installed mode for this file: Text Forge will send a warning (You can see it in notification panel) and open file using UTF-8 encoding. With this behavior you can open any file type that encoded with UTF-8 without any mode (It means a lot of files!) but there is no syntax highlighter for these files.
• Well done!