The first stable version of the elementary-inspired text editor ‘Scratch‘ has been released.

Scratch Text Editor by elementary

Scratch, written in Vala and Gtk+3, is similar to other text editors such as Gedit, but adds in additional user-friendly features.

These include a slew of developer-friendly syntax highlighting: –

Scratch Text Editor Syntax Highlighting

An ‘in-window’ search bar for searching words within a text file: –

Scratch Text Editor Search

Tabbed, as well as split document view, which lets you reference/work on two files at the same time: –

Scratch Text Editor split document view

A selection of user-configurable preferences: –

Scratch Text Editor preferences

And some quicklist loving: –

Scratch Unity Quicklist

Install Scratch in ubuntu 11.10

As Scratch is a GTK3 application you will need to be running Ubuntu 11.10 or similar inorder to install it.

You will also need to install an additional dependency not available in Ubuntu 11.10 by default: –

libgranite 32bit .deb

libgranite 64bit .deb

Once Granite has been installed you can proceed to download and install Scratch: –

Scratch 32bit .deb

Scratch 64bit .deb

There appears to be a bug with Scratch in that you can’t close it once opened. A workaround in the mean time: use this handy Unity applet to quit it.

elementary scratch Text Editor