PICO-8 mode

pico8-mode is a major mode for Emacs which supports PICO-8 .p8 file code editing. It’s based on lua-mode.

Features

• Sets a dimmer color for non-Lua sections of the .p8 file
• Offers basic auto-complete
  • Supports company-mode and completion-at-point
  • Completes PICO-8 builtins, functions, variables and arguments with some scoping
• Navigation with xref
• Documentation with eldoc
  • If PICO-8 manual path is set, then it shows builtin documentation from there.
• Renders sprites and labels inline in the buffer.

Setup

For now do an manual installation, as it’s not in MELPA.

Customization variables are available at group pico-8.

For documentation lookup to work, set pico8-documentation-file to an absolute path to “pico-8.txt” which is included with PICO-8. After setting this variable, run pico8-build-documentation function to force a rebuild. This happens automatically when the mode is loaded.

To be able to run PICO-8 from Emacs, set the pico8-executable-path variable to the pico8 executable. E.g. ~/Downloads/pico-8/pico8. Call pico8-run-cartridge and pico8-kill-process respectively.

Requirements

• lua-mode
• Emacs >= 25.1 (tested with 26)

Notes

This mode uses some internal functions from lua-mode, which means that it might fail if lua-mode updates in an incompatible way.