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Build Your Own Text Editor

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Re: Build Your Own Text Editor

#121

Post by abecedarius »

dboreham wrote: post #102
akkartik wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I understand now. Thanks. This is a pretty common way to write C, though, it's not something specific to this particular codebase. You just had a non-standard use case where you were constantly running into low-level bugs. (In an embedded platform?) If you aren't in that domain anymore, it's worth revisiting the trade-off. In most domains, gdb's continue command is super useful.

No. Parent is correct. Writing code just to show how clever you are, at the expense of others who need to debug and understand it later, is poor taste.

It's pretty weird to see "correct" justified by calling the opposite "poor taste". We're talking about a mismatch between a style of code and certain tools; a better answer is to use tools that work well with the style of code you like.

Re: Build Your Own Text Editor

#122

Post by pklausler »

I got fed up with the standard offerings back in '07 or so and hammered out my idea of a code editor that's perfect for me over a long weekend. It mmaps files initially for instant response, it has a small sensible command set that I can remember completely, it depends on nothing more than the standard C library and a terminal emulator, and it's not many more lines of code than some Emacs configuration files that I've seen. I still use it for everything.

Re: Build Your Own Text Editor

#123

Post by netghost »

Just have to say, this is ridiculously detailed, which is great. I'm not looking to build a text editor in C, but I learned a good amount just skimming the first few chapters.

Great site, great presentation, thanks for digging into it with so much detail.

Re: Build Your Own Text Editor

#125

Post by jason_slack »

JHonaker wrote: post #118
meifun wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do, sort of. I bought a text editor a number of years ago that was very popular. I still maintain it and use it daily and have often thought about putting out a new version. I have it running on many OS's and devices now. I have also added a lot of features specific to what I wanted. I'm not really sure if they are useful to others or not. Example: I have an iPad version where I can use an Apple Pencil and handwrit…

Um... Can I use it too? That sounds amazing.

really? I mean, I could probably make a version for folks to test. It only has git support and SFTP.

Committing to git currently works, push works, but sometimes says it fails. Still looking into this.

Color syntax highlighting works with your handwriting, but in the "worksheet" (an interactive shell) it does not yet.

Re: Build Your Own Text Editor

#126

Post by shanemhansen »

WalterBright wrote: post #23

Here's one from the 1980s, which I still use and keep up to date: https://github.com/DigitalMars/me and translated to D: https://github.com/DigitalMars/med

Thanks for sharing. Seeing a working emacs clone that compiles to a 66k executable is pretty awesome.

Re: Build Your Own Text Editor

#127

Post by sevensor »

sigzero wrote: post #115
vidarh wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus Torvalds also has his own version of MicroEmacs: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/editors/uemacs/uemacs.git

I wonder if he still uses it?

If he publicly mentioned a change, I haven't seen it. His turd-polishing comment about micro-emacs is a couple of years old at this point.

Re: Build Your Own Text Editor

#128

Post by WalterBright »

mhd wrote: post #89
WalterBright wrote: post #23

Here's one from the 1980s, which I still use and keep up to date: https://github.com/DigitalMars/me and translated to D: https://github.com/DigitalMars/med

Still use for occasional quick edits instead of vi/notepad or for proper, longer development tasks?

It's my primary editor. I'm so used to it I don't even know what the commands are - I just watch my fingers do it.

The first thing I do with a new system is port ME to it. I'll use vi to do what's necessary to get there (usually get ssh working so I can edit the files with ME on another machine).

I've worked out how to do syntax highlighting on it, but never got around to doing it.

Re: Build Your Own Text Editor

#129

Post by WalterBright »

shanemhansen wrote: post #126
WalterBright wrote: post #23

Here's one from the 1980s, which I still use and keep up to date: https://github.com/DigitalMars/me and translated to D: https://github.com/DigitalMars/med

Thanks for sharing. Seeing a working emacs clone that compiles to a 66k executable is pretty awesome.

Another thing to like is it has no configuration files. This mattered a great deal in the DOS days because floppies were so slow! But even today, who wants to futz with such? If it needs configuring, I just tweak the code and recompile it.

Back in the 80s, I handled configuration by having ME directly patch the ME executable. (This was a trick I learned from the old ADVENT Fortran game.) It was marvelously simple and bulletproof to do that.

Unfortunately, programs that patched their own executables became huge no-nos as malware took off, and I had to abandon that.

Re: Build Your Own Text Editor

#130

Post by dugmartin »

WalterBright wrote: post #129
shanemhansen wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing. Seeing a working emacs clone that compiles to a 66k executable is pretty awesome.

Another thing to like is it has no configuration files. This mattered a great deal in the DOS days because floppies were so slow! But even today, who wants to futz with such? If it needs configuring, I just tweak the code and recompile it. Back in the 80s, I handled configuration by having ME directly patch the ME executable. (This was a trick I learned from the old ADVENT Fortran game.) It was marvelously simple and…

I wrote quite a few DOS programs in the late 80's/early 90's that used ini files appended to the .exe as the configuration. All you had to do was run `copy prog.exe + config.ini program.exe` to build a single file that could be passed around without worrying about either a lost or changeable config file. Your code just needed to read its own exe header to figure out where to offset into it to pull out the ini contents after opening the file in read-only mode. It worked very well for apps where you didn't want users to mess with the config.
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