Welcome to the Home Page of the Alpha text editor!

The Alpha Text Editor has been famous on the Mac since the early 80's and has been maintained and modernized ever since. The AlphaCocoa project is a complete rewrite of Alpha for Mac OS X, based on the Cocoa framework.
Alpha is a multi-modal, programmable text editor that has become famous especially for its extraordinary capabilities for editing TeX and LaTeX documents, Web pages in HTML, or source files for many programming languages. It is easily extensible since most of its editing commands are written in Tcl.
Take a quick guided tour by visiting the Screenshots Gallery to get an idea of what Alpha can do.
This is an Open Source project hosted by SourceForge. Click here to open Alpha's Project Page.

Download

Download binaries

New releases are regularly published at SourceForge. The most recent release is "Suhail" for Mac OS X 10.11 or greater. This is version 9.2.3 (the version numbering of the new Alpha started at 9.0 for legacy reasons since its ancestor AlphaX stopped at 8.2.3). It is fully functional and reliable.
Here is the URL to download the disk image:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/alphacocoa/files/9.2.3/Alpha_9.2.3.dmg.zip/download

When you receive the archive:

double-click on the archive file (the file with a .zip extension) to uncompress it;
then double-click on the disk image (the file with a .dmg extension);
this opens a window containing the application. Just drag and drop the application Alpha onto the Applications folder.
you may now launch the application like any other application.

If you are looking for an older version of Alpha, go to Alpha's Release Page.

Download the source code

The latest state of the source code can be obtained from the Subversion repository with the following command:

    svn checkout http://svn.code.sf.net/p/alphacocoa/code/ Alpha

You can also browse the Subversion repository here.
In order to compile from sources, see the detailed instructions on the Compiling Alpha page.

Older versions

The previous version of this editor, named AlphaX, is now retiring. It was based on the Carbon framework and is still available here. It is not supported anymore and there is no guarantee that it will work properly on recent versions of Mac OS X.

Version Star

Since version 9.0, all versions of Alpha are named after a star. Traditionally, the main stars of a constellation are designated by a greek letter and the brightest one is usually called alpha.
The latest version of Alpha (9.2.3) is Suhail, which is λ Velorum, the λ star of the Vela constellation.

Getting Help

Here are some useful links to get help and information about Alpha.

Users Help

Readme

Quick Start

Alpha Manual

Alpha Help Topics

Questions & Answers

Users new to Alpha should start by reading the Readme file. In order to get rapidly acquainted with the basic notions, you should then read the file Quick Start.
The Alpha Manual is a more comprehensive document explaining everything in greater detail. This is the main user's guide for the Alpha text editor.
These three help files (Readme, Quick Start and Alpha Manual) are accessible from the top part of the Help menu of the application.
Many more specialized topics have their own help pages: see Alpha Help Topics.
All the Alpha packages and extensions also have a documentation of their own, also accessible through the Help menu of the application: see the Basic Help, Modes Help, Menus Help and Features Help submenus.
In case of doubt, don't hesitate to ask questions on the Alpha's Mailing Lists.
See also the Questions & Answers. In particular, QA #6: Can I import custom preferences from AlphaX ? may be of interest for users transitionning from AlphaX to the new Alpha.

Developers Help

The next links are meant for developers and maintainers of AlphaTcl packages.

The file Extending Alpha is a complete manual about extending the capacities of Alpha programmatically. This ranges from small code modifications (like creating one's own bindings or tweaking the existing behavior) to the creation of full-blown new packages, menus, modes etc.
The Commands Syntax page is the entry point to the syntax of all the core commands.
The Commands Reference page is the entry point to the reference for the complex core commands.
The Alpha Commands page contains the syntax of all the core commands grouped thematically.
The Commands Status page indicates the current implementation status of the core commands. It is also a useful reference to find out what is the replacement for an obsoleted command.
See also the Technical Notes.

Bug reports

Bugs may be officially reported via the Bug Tracker of the project.

Mailing lists

For any questions, problems, suggestions etc. about Alpha, you can use the alphacocoa-devel mailing list: click here to subscribe/unsubscribe.
To post a message to the list, send an e-mail to alphacocoa-devel@lists.sourceforge.net.
To see the collection of prior postings to the list, visit the Alphacocoa-devel Archives.
To search the list archives, see Search Mailman.

Wiki

You may use the Alpha Wiki to discuss any ideas related to the text editor.

Last updated 2021-05-21 14:43:31

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