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Fine, I'll build my own text editor

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Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor

#141

Post by jillesvangurp »

vintermann wrote: post #37

I still miss NEdit. Around 2001 when I started getting into Linux seriously, I was also reading a lot about cults - Scientology had recently, infamously, forced Slashdot to take down a comment about their secret practices. One of the things I read was that a common cult trick was to demand that people re-learn basic skills so that they do them the "right" way, like reading (Scientology did that), eating (chew X times…

Can't say I miss nedit. But it was alright for the mid nineties when I used it on university workstations (a mix of Sun, HP, and SGI hardware). I also got into Jedit for a while. Nice editor and the plugin system it had was pretty advanced for the time. This before we had the option of using something like javascript to do the same kinds of things (like vs code and other editors now do). Java had the ability to dynamically load jar files for plugins at run time.

These days I use VS Code which is more than fine for my needs and it of course has a very rich plugin ecosystem. I never really got into vi, Emacs, or other terminal editors. I can use vi in a pinch (on remote servers when there's nothing else). For most programming I prefer full IDEs. (intellij for the last few years). Or at least I used to; these days it's mostly agentic coding tools doing the editing for me.

Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor

#142

Post by solarexplorer »

bruckie wrote: post #49
tzs wrote: post #31

Sometime around 1980-81 I had a part time job while an undergraduate in college doing system programming/admin for the Caltech High Energy Physics department. Rob Pike was the system programmer/admin before me when he was a grad student in high energy physics, but he left to go work at Bell Labs. One day another student, Karl Heuer, and I both were engaging in the common programmer pastime of complaining about the sc…

Here's Rob's editor (or at least one of them): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)

Here is another one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_(text_editor)

I have used both editors quite a bit and did like both of them.

Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor

#143

Post by fg137 »

When I saw the title, I thought this is about a native editor. A noble pursuit.

As I read on I realized this is about a web based editor. Almost just as noble but I would not wish anyone go down this rabbit hole. You cannot build a good, performant and useful editor without sinking tons of work, as proved by many people. You could create something simple but will very quickly discover all sorts of problems and edge cases with it.

Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor

#145

Post by NooneAtAll3 »

bigiain wrote: post #38
tzs wrote: post #31

Sometime around 1980-81 I had a part time job while an undergraduate in college doing system programming/admin for the Caltech High Energy Physics department. Rob Pike was the system programmer/admin before me when he was a grad student in high energy physics, but he left to go work at Bell Labs. One day another student, Karl Heuer, and I both were engaging in the common programmer pastime of complaining about the sc…

I was hoping for this to end with "I wrote emacs, and Karl wrote vi."

[flagged]

Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor

#146

Post by artyomsv »

boxed wrote: post #111
self_awareness wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "LSP support" I didn't mean "editor should call this API over HTTP and interpret whatever LSP server responds". It's a lot more than that, and LSP support in editors if often times broken. It's like saying that editor can have full AI support because it can send HTTP requests to an MCP server. But MCP server isn't the end of the problem, it's just a gateway to problems, just like LSP. For example, jdtls is often t…

Hmm. I guess there needs to be some kind of general test suite editors and LSPs can validate against?

[dead]

Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor

#147

Post by xyzelement »

pmkary wrote: post #5
pmkary wrote: post #4

Text 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.

[flagged]

Don't stress about it. The other day there was a thread about public bathroom descriptions and someone said "wow this has a countdown timer before the doors automatically open, how stress inducing" and I wrote "shit or get off the pot".

Now overall it's a well up voted comment but occasionally can see someone taking it down a point. What a psychological mystery. A normal person sees a humorous quip and either chuckles or ignores.

So a down vote is what.. someone offended by mild profanity? Someone who perceives me (correctly I guess) as not being empathetic to bathroom anxiety.

Point being - who cares. Make a post you think would be valuable for some reason (funny, informative) and move on. Someone is going to take issue with everything and that's just the beauty of the diversity of life.

Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor

#149

Post by pmarreck »

The highlit line and cursor are 1 down from the line it thinks it is editing.

I see off-by-one errors are still a common bug class, lol

EDIT: It's only in the earlier examples.

I'm glad you use pulsating cursors. I made this work in WezTerm but it is expensive CPU-wise!

Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor

#150

Post by ferguess_k »

dist-epoch wrote: post #107
socksy wrote: post #103

Earlier 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.

If average Google programmers are too stupid to program in C++, what kind of qualities are needed to get good at programming in C++? Like 140+ IQ? Or one needs to really sit down, think through, slow down, which is against the "velocity"?
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