pyside6-scintilla 5.6.3.0

Permissively-licensed PySide6 bindings for the Scintilla code editor component

pyside6-scintilla

Permissively-licensed PySide6 bindings for the Scintilla code editor component.

Status

The ScintillaEditBase binding is implemented and working — see examples/simple_scintilla_base_edit/ for a runnable demo. Pre-built wheels aren't published yet; build from source (see Installation). ScintillaEdit (Scintilla's full ~700-method API) and CI-built wheels for Linux/Windows/macOS are planned — see docs/mission.md for the roadmap.

Why this exists

The standard way to use Scintilla from Python + Qt is QScintilla (Riverbank Computing) — but it's a PyQt6 binding, with no PySide6 equivalent. Like PyQt6, it's also GPLv3 or commercially licensed.

Scintilla itself is licensed under the Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer — a permissive license with no copyleft. This project aims to expose that permissive core directly to PySide6 users.

Goals

pyside6-scintilla aims to be:

• MIT licensed — usable in open-source or closed-source projects freely
• PySide6 native — built with shiboken6, integrating naturally with PySide6 widgets
• A faithful, low-level binding of Scintilla's ScintillaEditBase widget — not a reimplementation of QScintilla's higher-level API
• Available as pre-built wheels for Linux (x86_64, aarch64), Windows (x86_64), and macOS (arm64, x86_64)
• Not affiliated with Riverbank Computing or the QScintilla project

Installation

pyside6-scintilla isn't published as a working package yet — the PyPI listing is a placeholder reserving the name (see Versioning). For now, build it from source:

git clone https://github.com/borco/pyside6-scintilla.git
cd pyside6-scintilla
uv sync

This requires Qt 6.10+ (including the Qt6Core5Compat module) and a C++17 compiler — see docs/build.md for prerequisites and platform-specific setup.

Usage

from PySide6.QtWidgets import QApplication
from pyside6_scintilla import Scintilla, ScintillaEditBase

app = QApplication([])
editor = ScintillaEditBase()
editor.sends(int(Scintilla.Message.SetText), 0, "hello, world")
editor.show()
app.exec()

ScintillaEditBase exposes Scintilla's low-level message API via .send()/ .sends() — the same SCI_* messages as the C interface, not a QScintilla-style high-level API. See examples/simple_scintilla_base_edit/ for a complete example (line-number margin, block selection/editing).

Versioning

Version numbers follow <Scintilla version>.<binding revision> — e.g. 5.6.3.0 is binding revision 0 for Scintilla 5.6.3. The binding revision increments for releases of this package that don't correspond to a new Scintilla version (bug fixes, new API surface, CI changes, etc.), and resets to 0 when Scintilla itself releases a new version.

Documentation

Doc	Contents
docs/auditing.md	How to verify the vendored Scintilla source matches upstream
docs/bindings.md	How the shiboken6 bindings are built, generated files, and the Scintilla-update procedure
docs/build.md	Build prerequisites, local build/rebuild, wheels, and publishing
docs/mission.md	Project background, goals, and design decisions

License

• src/scintilla/ — HPND License (Scintilla, copyright Neil Hodgson)
• Everything else — MIT License