Build Your Own Text Editor

Reference implementations of medium sized applications are incredibly useful for leveling up as a programmer. While there are many large successful open source applications, many are overwhelming to read and learn from. Having something that outlines the key features and components and which ignores the important but complicated edge cases assists in keeping the attention focused. Now if there are annotation within the source code, that would be truely incredible.

This is a nice guide which walks through building the small editor, kilo, by antirez of redis fame. The original editor was introduced here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12065217 I put together a fork of that editor, in C++, with support for buffers, scripting with Lua, and similar things. Nothing amazing, but still quite useful. That was posted here to some small interest: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12137698

Chapter 2 is an excellent dive into some of the more unfamiliar and confusing features emulated by terminal emulators. It would be neat to have an equivalent set-up using a GUI toolkit instead, but the terminal is good enough to work with. In a broader sense, it's pretty frustrating to know that we are still emulating features (like ctrl-[s,q]) that only really made sense in the context of a physical terminal. The amount of work and frustration we could save…

"I think everyone should have their own custom editor for editing their program files. I don't believe in universal editors. An editor is so easy to write that why, why not?" - Chuck Moore https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1FUY6g5crA&t=1278s