Code Editor

Font and Line Height

Font settings
Font

Choose from a selection of built-in monospaced fonts. You can also install custom fonts.

Font Size

Increase or decrease the editor font size using the stepper.

Line Height

Increase or decrease the line height. Use it to adjust the spacing between lines in the code editor. The default is 110%.

Editor Theme and Keyboard Appearance

Theme settings

Since iOS 13, users can choose to adopt a dark system-wide appearance called Dark Mode.

In Textastic, you can set separate themes and keyboard appearances for light appearance and dark appearance.

Theme

Select the theme you want to use in the code editor. The list of themes starts with light themes and ends with dark themes. You can also add custom themes.

Dark Keyboard

Enable this setting if you want to use a dark keyboard instead of the default light keyboard.

See also

Have a look at UI Theme on how to select the UI theme to use for dark and light system appearances.

Gutter and Line Numbers

Line number settings
Line Numbers

Enable this settings to display the number of each line on the left side of each line.

Indicate Selection

If line numbers are enabled, you can choose to indicate the start and end of the current selection in the gutter:

Selection indicators
Show Line/Column

Show a line/column indicator on the right side above the code editor while editing a file (iPad only).

Line and column

Tab Characters

Tab characters settings
Tab Width

Select the number of spaces one tab corresponds to.

Soft Tabs

Enable to insert spaces instead of a tab character when you press the Tab key.

Invisible Characters

Invisible character settings
Show Tabs

Enable to show tab characters as small gray triangles in the editor.

Show Spaces

Enable to show space characters as dots in the editor.

Show Newlines

Enable to indicate newline characters at the end of each line in the editor.

Show All / Show None

Tap to quickly show all or no invisible characters.

Word Wrap

Word wrap settings
Indent Wrapped Lines

Enable to indent soft wrapped lines. This makes it much easier to read code, but you may want to disable it for regular text/prose.

Auto Word Wrap

Enable to visually wrap lines (soft wrap) to the editor width.

Wrap Column

If Auto Word Wrap is disabled, you can manually enter a column at which lines are soft-wrapped.

Keyboard

Keyboard settings
Read-Only

Enable this settings to make the editor read-only. Tapping on the editor won’t bring up the keyboard anymore.

Auto-Correction

Enable to spellcheck words as you type, automatically correcting misspelled words. You should disable this if editing code.

Auto-Capitalization

Enable automatic capitalization of the first letter of each sentence.

Smart Punctuation

Enable to allow smart quotes and automatic conversion between hyphens and en or em dashes.

Additional Keys

Enable the additional row of keys above the standard keyboard (iPad only).

Shortcuts

Enable the standard shortcuts bar above the keyboard which has buttons for undo/redo and copy/cut/paste (iPad only). If you enable Additional Keys, this should be disabled to save screen space.

Text Editing

Text editing settings
Code Completion

Enable code completion. Currently, Textastic supports code completion for HTML, JavaScript, CSS, C, Objective-C, and PHP.

Indent Based on Syntax

Automatically indent code when typing, based on its syntax. For example, increases the indentation when pressing Return after an opening curly brace (“{”) in C or an opening tag in HTML and decreases indentation after a closing curly brace (“}”) or a closing tag.

Close Brackets and Quotes

Automatically insert a matching closing character when typing an opening bracket or quote. This works for the following pairs: "", '', (), [], {}.

Emmet

Emmet settings
Emmet Cheat Sheet

Open the Emmet Cheat Sheet in the browser. Also have a look at the Emmet Documentation.

Expand with Tab

Enable to expand Emmet abbreviations with the Tab key if possible (this works for example in HTML, CSS, XML, Less, Sass, and SCSS files).

You can also use Ctrl-E on an external keyboard to expand Emmet abbreviations. See External Keyboard Shortcuts.

Cursor Navigation Wheel

Cursor navigation wheel setting
Show Hints

By default, the cursor navigation wheel shows hints when adding, removing or moving selection handles with the buttons in the middle of the wheel. You can disable this here.

TextExpander

TextExpander settings
TextExpander

Enable TextExpander snippet expansion with this setting.

Update Snippets

Tap here to launch the TextExpander app and fetch a copy of the latest snippets.