Text editing hates you too (2019)

Please add (2019) to the title.

For people involved with technology I think this is a perfect response to "how hard can it be" - no matter if they're discussing how to keep toilet paper stocked or why cURL can be replaced with five lines of shell script - it emphatically shows how complicated something apparently simple can be once you start diving into it.

Also “Text Rendering Hates You”, referenced by this post, previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21105625

You know, every text editing system I've seen that knocks off word (has those "bold", "italic", etc.) selectors has something anomalous in how selections are handled.

A good article, which shows that even plain text editing (without any formatty) is already way more complex than a layperson may appreciate.

For the developer, there are some gems to be discovered when writing a text editor; recall that using regular expressions coverted to finite state machines saw the light as part of editing, and I remember being given a very cool paper (from the 1960s!) by my undergrad compiler construction professor that proposed an efficient algorithm for testing whether a string containing a line of text can possibly be a substring of any valid Pascal program (it was a piece of theory invented while and for a syntax-aware Pascal editor, possibly from IBM but not sure). Another thing is data structures: I learned of ropes, an alternative to strings for representing text (optimized for fast editing) in the context of text editing: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/spe.4380251203