Recently I’ve been trying out the open source editor Light Table. It has a lot of great features, my favorite being inline evaluation. The editor will run a single line of code and display the value at the end! It’s super customizable and really reminds me of Sublime Text in terms of looks.

Here are some simple instructions on how to install Light Table and create a nice launcher for it.

  • Download the correct version for your system from lighttable.com.
  • Change directory to wherever the file is located.
  • Unzip the archive. This will give you a folder called LightTable. The wildcard ‘*’ in the filename makes this command work for either the 32-bit or 64-bit downloads.
  • Move the unzipped folder to /opt to live with other non-traditional installations. Then delete the archive. Note: Programs in /opt are available to all users.
  • Create a launcher file called light-table.desktop and enter the details to make it work.

    Make sure to hit enter at the end to leave a blank line, then hit Ctrl+D to exit the cat command.
  • Make the launcher executable so Ubuntu registers it as a program.
  • Last step is to create a symlink in your user /bin folder to enable calling Light Table from a terminal. You can call yours whatever you want, but here I’ve named it ltable so the command to start it up is nice and short.

    Edit: If ~/bin does not exist, create it. Ubuntu treats ~/bin like a per-user installation folder. If you want this shortcut to be available for all users, instead use sudo and place it in /usr/local/bin.

That’s it! All done! Have fun using and customizing the Light Table editor! I’m certainly no Light Table expert but if you have any questions about these instructions please let me know in the comments. Have a great day!