ReText is a simple but powerful editor for markup languages. It is based on Markups module which supports Markdown, reStructuredText, Textile and AsciiDoc. One can also add support for custom markups using Python modules.

To install ReText, make sure that you have Python (3.9 or later) installed, and run pip3 install ReText. To avoid system-wide installation, you can create a virtual environment and install from there. You can also manually download the tarball from PyPI or clone the repository, and then run ./retext.py.

ReText requires PyQt6 and Markups (4.0 or later) to run. When you run pip3 install ReText, pip will install them automatically, but you can also install manually and specify markups that you are going to use using extras syntax, e.g.:

pip3 install Markups[markdown,restructuredtext,textile]

We also recommend having these packages installed:

• pyenchant — for spell checking support
• chardet — for encoding detection support
• PyQt6-WebEngine — a more powerful preview engine with JavaScript support

Translation files are already compiled for release tarballs and will be automatically loaded. For development snapshots, compile translations using lrelease ReText/locale/*.ts command (on Debian-based systems, use /usr/lib/qt6/bin/lrelease from qt6-l10n-tools package). Translation files can also be loaded from /usr/share/retext/ directory.

You can translate ReText into your language on Transifex.

ReText is Copyright 2011–2025 Dmitry Shachnev, 2011–2023 Maurice van der Pot, and is licensed under GNU GPL (v2+) license, the current version is available in LICENSE_GPL file.

ReText icon is based on accessories-text-editor icon from the Faenza theme.

You can read more about ReText in the wiki.