Writing my own text editor, and daily-driving it • Hacker News Board

Re: Writing my own text editor, and daily-driving it

#121

Post by chambored » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 5:20 PM UTC

entaloneralie wrote: post #103

chambored wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What were the features that were most important to you in your text editor? Did you try to build it for multiple types of workflows?

One of the first thing I added was Leap keys-type search, I didn't want modes. - Leap keys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c The second was pragma-mark navigation, so I can always see a overview of the codebase. - navbar: https://assets.merveilles.town/media_attachments/files/116/2... I also wanted a local copy buffer specific to the project I work on, so I could easily manage multiple copies of the clipbo…

I've never seen a leap mode like this. It seems pretty intuitive.

Re: Writing my own text editor, and daily-driving it

#122

Post by Narishma » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 5:41 PM UTC

ivanjermakov wrote: post #72

kleiba wrote: post #33

There's a reason Emacs and vi have been around for decades. They're good.

Maybe not good, but tenacious. Once you have a muscle memory, it's rarely worth the effort to switch.

No, they're good. Otherwise new people wouldn't be learning and using them.

Re: Writing my own text editor, and daily-driving it

#123

Post by osmsucks » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 9:43 AM UTC

doom2 wrote: post #119

osmsucks wrote: post #27

I, too, mourn the death of Howl. It was a quirky yet surprisingly "comfortable" editor. But I am now at home with Helix and Flow Control.

When do you choose one over the other?

Helix is my default, as it's a more mature/stable editor. I fire up Flow Control from time to time to follow how it's developing and for more casual editing. They both do an excellent job overall, but my muscle memory binds me to Helix for now.

(I know Flow Control provides Helix keybindings, but I haven't tried that yet and I generally like to retain the default behavior of an editor so that my user experience is more "portable" across machines.)

Re: Writing my own text editor, and daily-driving it

#124

Post by MomsAVoxell » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 9:13 PM UTC

mdonahoe wrote: post #114

I had fun re-implementing antirez's "kilo" editor https://github.com/antirez/kilo There's a nice tutorial for it https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/ Great way to learn more about terminal modes and write some raw C

I’m a bit partial to antirez’ LOAD81 editor, myself ..

https://github.com/antirez/LOAD81

.. but that’s mostly because LOAD81 is just fully great as well .. I’ll have to dig into kilo a bit and see how antirez’ two editors compare with each other ..