4.2 Text editor support

There is support for different text editors for LilyPond.


Emacs mode

Emacs has a ‘lilypond-mode’, which provides keyword autocompletion, indentation, LilyPond specific parenthesis matching and syntax coloring, handy compile short-cuts and reading LilyPond manuals using Info. If ‘lilypond-mode’ is not installed on your platform, see below.

An Emacs mode for entering music and running LilyPond is contained in the source archive in the ‘elisp’ directory. Do make install to install it to elispdir. The file ‘lilypond-init.el’ should be placed to load-path/site-start.d/’ or appended to your ‘~/.emacs’ or ‘~/.emacs.el’.

As a user, you may want add your source path (e.g. ‘~/site-lisp/’) to your load-path by appending the following line (as modified) to your ‘~/.emacs

(setq load-path (append (list (expand-file-name "~/site-lisp")) load-path))

Vim mode

For Vim, a filetype plugin, indent mode, and syntax-highlighting mode are available to use with LilyPond. To enable all of these features, create (or modify) your ‘$HOME/.vimrc’ to contain these three lines, in order:

filetype off
set runtimepath+=/usr/local/share/lilypond/current/vim/
filetype on
syntax on

If LilyPond is not installed in the ‘/usr/local/’ directory, change the path appropriately. This topic is discussed in Other sources of information.


Other editors

Other editors (both text and graphical) support LilyPond, but their special configuration files are not distributed with LilyPond. Consult their documentation for more information. Such editors are listed in Easier editing.


LilyPond — Usage v2.24.3 (stable-branch).