Lite XL Encoding Plugin

This repository provides a native and lua plugin to extend lite-xl and provide the missing functionality to handle document encodings.

Native

Adds an API for automatic detection of files or strings encoding using uchardet. The api also exposes a customized SDL_iconv_string() to allow converting between different encodings and functions for byte order marks handling.

You can view the API documention on the docs subdirectory.

Lua

Leverages the native plugin to add automatic conversion from non-UTF8 encodings to UTF-8 encoding on file load by autodetecting its encoding at load time. It respects the detected file encoding by saving back from UTF-8 to the originally detected encoding.

Also it handles byte order marks on UTF-16LE, UTF-16BE, UTF-32LE. UTF-32BE, UTF-7, UTF-8 and GB18030 when opening and saving, and uses the BOM to detect the document charset on file load.

As a consequence allows to properly read files that are not encoded in UTF-8 or ASCII which isn't possible right now on Lite XL.

Screenshots

Building

You will need to have meson and a working build environment for your operating system. Then, to build just execute the following commands:

meson setup build
meson compile -C build

Installation

To install just copy the generated library file to your libraries directory:

cp build/encoding.so ~/.config/lite-xl/libraries/

Then install the Lua plugin to take advantage of the native plugin and extend lite-xl encoding management capabilities:

cp plugins/encodings.lua ~/.config/lite-xl/plugins/

Lua plugins using the native encoding API:

• encodings.lua - extends Lite XL to provide proper file decoding/encoding management.