Textile File Format (.textile)

A TEXTILE file holds Textile markup, Dean Allen's 2002 lightweight syntax for the Textpattern content management system, using punctuation like *bold*, _italic_ and bq. for a blockquote to generate HTML.

.textileDocuments

Textile at a glance#

Full name	Textile markup
File extension	.textile
Category	Documents
Developer	Dean Allen
First released	2002
Compression	Uncompressed
FileFlip support	FileFlip reads and writes this format

What a .textile file can hold#

These are the things a Textile file either supports or does not, and they are what decides whether a conversion keeps everything or quietly drops something.

Selectable text	Yes
Human readable	Yes

Strengths and limitations of Textile#

What Textile does well

Handles typographic substitution automatically, turning straight quotes, ellipses and double hyphens into their proper typeset characters
Block-level codes like h1. through h6. and bq. set a paragraph's role in one line, without wrapping it in punctuation on both sides
Still built into Redmine, so its project wikis and issue text are written in it by default

Where Textile falls short

Adoption has fallen far behind Markdown, so most editors and static site generators need a plugin to support it at all
Separate implementations, PHP Textile, RedCloth for Ruby, python-textile, drifted apart on edge cases over the years, echoing Markdown's own fragmentation
The original textile-lang.com reference site is no longer reliably available, leaving each implementation's own documentation as the de facto spec

Use Textile when working inside a system that already expects it, such as a Redmine wiki or a long-running Textpattern site.

Convert Textile to Markdown when moving content to a modern platform, since almost everything built in the last decade expects Markdown instead.

How to open a .textile file#

A .textile file opens in the programs below, grouped by the platform you are on. If you would rather not install anything, FileFlip converts Textile into a format your machine already opens, and it does it in the browser tab rather than on a server.

Platform	Programs that open it
Windows	VS Code, Notepad++, Sublime Text
macOS	VS Code, Sublime Text, TextEdit
Linux	VS Code, vim, gedit
Web	FileFlip

Textile questions people ask#

What is a Textile file used for?

A Textile file holds plain text written in Textile markup, a lightweight syntax from the early blogging era that's still the default markup in Redmine's wikis and issue tracker. Textile source is written to be converted to HTML, either by Textpattern, Redmine or a standalone library like RedCloth.

Is Textile the same as Markdown?

No. Textile and Markdown are separate lightweight markup languages created around the same time, and their syntax differs throughout, Textile uses codes like h1. for a heading and bq. for a blockquote, where Markdown uses # and >. A file written in one isn't valid in the other.

What software still uses Textile?

Redmine uses Textile as its default wiki and issue-description markup, and it appears in some older installs of Basecamp Classic, Jira and other systems that adopted it during the mid-2000s. Most newer platforms have since standardized on Markdown instead.

Converting Textile files#

Every conversion runs inside your browser. The file is read from your disk, the work happens on your own machine, and nothing is uploaded. How FileFlip works names the engine behind each family and how to verify that for yourself.