pyside6-scintilla 5.6.3.3

Permissively-licensed PySide6 bindings for the Scintilla code editor component

pyside6-scintilla

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

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Status

The ScintillaEditBase, ScintillaEdit, and ScintillaDocument bindings are implemented and working — see examples/ for runnable demos. Pre-built wheels are published on PyPI for Linux (x86_64), Windows (x86_64), and macOS (arm64, x86_64), Python 3.11-3.14 — see Installation. Linux aarch64 wheels are planned — see docs/specs/roadmap.md for the roadmap.

The docs site has a full "Scintilla API" navigation tree, but most pages are still placeholders pending conversion from the upstream ScintillaDoc.html — see docs/specs/roadmap.md for conversion progress.

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

Install from PyPI:

pip install pyside6-scintilla

PySide6 6.10+ is installed automatically as a dependency; the wheels bundle everything else ScintillaEditBase needs at runtime.

To build from source instead (e.g. for development), see docs/build.md for prerequisites (Qt 6.10+ with Qt6Core5Compat, a C++17 compiler) and platform-specific setup.

Usage

from PySide6.QtWidgets import QApplication
from pyside6_scintilla import ScintillaEdit

app = QApplication([])
editor = ScintillaEdit()
editor.setText("hello, world")
editor.show()
app.exec()

ScintillaEdit exposes a typed method per Scintilla message (e.g. setText(), textLength(), gotoLine()) on top of ScintillaEditBase's raw .send()/.sends() message API — the same SCI_* messages as the C interface, not a QScintilla-style high-level API. See examples/simple_scintilla_edit/ for a complete example (line-number margin, "Go to Line", block selection/editing), or examples/simple_scintilla_base_edit/ for the lower-level send/sends API.

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/alternatives.md	How this compares to Monaco-based Qt bindings and other line-numbers + block-edit widgets
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/documenting.md	How the docs site is built, and how to add or update a page
docs/specs/	Design specifications and action plans for in-progress and planned work
docs/specs/mission.md	Project background, goals, and design decisions
docs/specs/roadmap.md	Ordered list of upcoming work
docs/testpypi.md	Setting up TestPyPI trusted publishing

Development tools

tools/ holds development scripts, run with uv run python tools/<script>.py:

Script	Purpose
generate_pyi.py	Regenerates the .pyi type stub for _pyside6_scintilla
check_docs_sync.py	Verifies shared content blocks stay in sync between README.md and docs/index.md
clean_window_corners.py	One-off cleanup for Windows window screenshots used in docs

License

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