41–50 of 64 posts
Apart from the learning experience, there is still value in a small-sized, fast TUI text editor for Linux. However, my two suggestions would be: - add Unicode support (it's the 21st century, so ∑, ®, etc. should finally work); this is not easy, but the earlier you do it the less dramatic the changes will be (check out https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/tree/main/icu4c); - don't allocate the lines individually (as you…
Apart from the learning experience, there is still value in a small-sized, fast TUI text editor for Linux. However, my two suggestions would be: - add Unicode support (it's the 21st century, so ∑, ®, etc. should finally work); this is not easy, but the earlier you do it the less dramatic the changes will be (check out https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/tree/main/icu4c); - don't allocate the lines individually (as you…
As an alternative to ICU, there is suckless's libgrapheme ( https://libs.suckless.org/libgrapheme/ ) which is more than a 100x smaller and provides full Unicode compatibility.
vim
The Craft of Text Editing ¹ should be required reading for everybody who wants to write a new text editor. 1. https://www.finseth.com/craft/ >
I've also been writing my own terminal text editor for a while (just crossed the ten years mark!), so I know how much dedication this takes. :-)
One thing I did recently was start writing the lessons I've learned in my journey, I figured I'd share it in case it helps you, maybe you'll find one or two ideas interesting: https://github.com/alefore/weblog/blob/master/edge-lessons.m...
Going sort of the other way, making an X version of a Borland-like ui, a long time ago I liked XWPE for a while. Even built it for SCO.
It seems like an interesting project as well! I'd love to see it one day
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> This will speed things up and reduce fragmentation Does this really make much of a practical difference these last decades? I wrote a text editor back in the late 90s in DOS using DJGPP with per-line allocation and it worked fine on the Pentium MMX i had at the time (and my approach to optimization at that time was be ignorant of the concept :-P), i'm not sure it'd really make much of a difference on any desktop or…
No, it won't. You might want an arena for other reasons (better reasoning about lifetimes, preventing nest of pointers, etc.), but an array of line array approach to text editors is totally valid (except in the case of millions of extremely small lines).
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I have to say that when I saw retro I expected ncurses support. Not all retro terminals understand VT100 escape sequences ;-) What about those who use VT-52 terminals?
Unless you’re using an actual hardware VT52, then it’s pretty safe to assume VT100 support these days.