pyside6-scintilla

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

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Status

See GitHub Issues for what's done and what's next.

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-Essentials 6.11.x is installed automatically as a dependency; the wheels bundle everything else ScintillaEditBase needs at runtime. Each release is built for, and pinned to, one PySide6 minor (its binding libraries aren't ABI-compatible across minors), so on another PySide6 minor pip picks the release built for it, or refuses the install, rather than installing a wheel that fails to import. Essentials provides the whole PySide6 import namespace — only QtCore, QtGui and QtWidgets are used here, so the ~175 MB of PySide6-Addons (Qt WebEngine, Qt3D, QtCharts …) is left out. Install PySide6 yourself if you want them.

To build from source instead (e.g. for development), see docs/build.md for prerequisites (Qt 6.11 with Qt6Core5Compat, a C++17 compiler) and platform-specific setup.

examples/highlighting/lexilla_highlighting/ uses lexilla as a dev dependency, installed from PyPI like any other package.

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

Development tools

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

License

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