Recent and related: They don't make 'em like Sublime Text anymore - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49209354 - Aug 2026 (13 comments)
I still use Sublime Text, is it going to be the new Firefox now?
Fine, I'll build my own text editor
121–130 of 263 posts
Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor
#122He used AI but his site says “No AI”
Where do you get he used AI?
Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor
#123I literally just got Fable to write me a text editor. Well, I'll be honest, I got it to wrap the KDE KTextEditor library which is like 90% of a text editor. I had been using Kate which was what an LLM suggested was the closest to something like Sublime Text on Fedora. But even Kate, which was great, had too much going on. So I asked Fable to take the text editor part (KTextEditor) and wrap it using Rust with an LSP s…
Kate is a good editor and it needs more publicity and more extensions. But, in my experience, as far as speed goes, it is slower than Sublime Text in my machine though still tolerable.
Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor
#124Fine, I do this since several decades.
I use an editor-construction kit named "Emacs" to build my own Editor, and IDE, and git porcelain, and organizer, and wiki. And many things more.
IDE with e.g. LSP integration, rustix and many other programmer-related modes and enhancements like tree-sitter. Git porcelain with magit. Organizer with Org-Mode. Wiki with denote.
Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor
#125I recently learned that Odin has fully-featured text editing primitives in its core library. Coupled with the bundled raylib library, it should be fairly easy to build a GUI text editor from scratch.
Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor
#126Yes, who would have guessed that the element, designed specifically for this use case and built into browsers for 3 decades, would be the most performant and behaviorally consistent way to implement editable text. I'm kind of sad the author stopped shedding unneeded complexity there though... we're not really building a text editor yet, we're building a website with a fancy input field. If we want to build a proper t…
So we take a web browser and trim it down to only ever show a single element you say? That's what I'm taking away from this. All the hard work for accessibility is already done then right?
Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's amazing just how many stories of Rob Pike seem to show him being both a dick and wrong
He created Go because he believed that the average Google programmer is too stupid to program in C++, and he didn't like Java, the other language created to address this problem.
Honestly could you blame him for not liking Java in 2007? Between the many layers of abstractions the frameworks used, the exceptions and the sluggishness to compile it was not a compelling stack
Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor
#128[deleted]
Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor
#129Text editors are like mechanical watches or fountain pens. There is just so much beauty in the machinery that makes them. For me, there are hardly any other modules that are this satisfying to watch being made. Each time I find a new one (a good one like this), with everything on ropes and rendering and I-beam placement computations and ... it feels like a Christmas gift.
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I just assume that downvotes without explanation just mean that I am right and that has somehow made someone unhappy.
Unless I've been deliberately bait-y, which does sometimes happen, of course.
Sometimes I reread later I realise that I've come across in an unpleasant manner that I did not intend, or I misunderstood and my comment is irrelevant, necessary, or occasionally just plain wrong.
The real fun comes when you divide the audience: a few of my fairly negative comments around AI have bounced between -1 and 1-or-2 for days after posting, as some hate it and down vote then others see that as unfair and upvote, almost all without leaving any comment about why they agree or disagree (with either the content or my style).
Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor
#130> Fine, I'll build my own text editor
> “They don’t make ’em like Sublime Text anymore” resonated with a lot of folk.
My first kneejerk reaction was, no, Sublime wasn't even that good or performant. We also really don't need another garbage baby's first text editor.
But then
> I’m good at building garbage!
I appreciate the sentiment, and I guess that IS the right approach to the problem, don't take it too seriously. And the rest of the writeup describes some fun basic hoops you have to jump through to build something as simple as a text editor, so good job.