Scintilla

Scintilla is a term that can refer to a small spark or trace of light. The word derives from the Latin scintilla, meaning spark. In scientific contexts, a scintilla describes the brief flash of light produced when ionizing radiation interacts with a scintillating material.

In radiation detection, scintillation light is converted into electrical signals by photomultiplier tubes or photodiodes, enabling measurements in fields such as medical imaging, nuclear physics, and security. Detectors that use this light production are called scintillation counters, and their performance depends on the properties of the scintillator material and the readout system.

Scintilla is also the name of a free, open-source text editing component used to build many programmers’ editors. It provides features such as syntax highlighting, code folding, automatic indentation, margin and line numbering, and extensible language grammars. It is written in C++ and is cross-platform. Notepad++, SciTE, and Geany use Scintilla or its forks; a Qt port is available as QScintilla.

History and licensing notes that Scintilla was developed in the 1990s by Neil Hodgson and released under a permissive open-source license. The project remains active through community contributions, with updates and extensions that support a wide range of programming languages and development environments.