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The Craft of Text Editing (1999)

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Re: The Craft of Text Editing (1999)

#4

Post by cmyr »

I've been learning a lot lately by following along with the development of xi[1], a new text editor written in Rust. Through reading that project's RFCs I've then come across other interesting projects, like swiobe[2] and wi[3].

What are the other canonical resources on this topic? It feels like tons of the interesting thought is scattered around various blogs and usenet posts and the like. I'd love to create a nice collection of good writing on text-editing / tools, but I'm not sure where to start.

[1] https://github.com/google/xi-editor

[2] https://github.com/swiboe/swiboe

[3] https://github.com/wi-ed/wi

Re: The Craft of Text Editing (1999)

#5

Post by gwright »

cmyr wrote: post #4

I've been learning a lot lately by following along with the development of xi[1], a new text editor written in Rust. Through reading that project's RFCs I've then come across other interesting projects, like swiobe[2] and wi[3]. What are the other canonical resources on this topic? It feels like tons of the interesting thought is scattered around various blogs and usenet posts and the like. I'd love to create a nice…

Sam comes to mind as an interesting project in this area:

http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/sam/

Re: The Craft of Text Editing (1999)

#6

Post by jasonm23 »

cmyr wrote: post #4

I've been learning a lot lately by following along with the development of xi[1], a new text editor written in Rust. Through reading that project's RFCs I've then come across other interesting projects, like swiobe[2] and wi[3]. What are the other canonical resources on this topic? It feels like tons of the interesting thought is scattered around various blogs and usenet posts and the like. I'd love to create a nice…

REmacs is a very interesting development...

https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs/blob/master/README.md

Re: The Craft of Text Editing (1999)

#8

Post by polm23 »

Todd wrote: post #2

A paper that covers some of the data structures used in editors is: https://www.cs.unm.edu/~crowley/papers/sds.pdf The gap buffer, in particular, is a great example of a simple yet powerful idea that is perfectly suited to the problem domain.

The text in that PDF didn't show up correctly for me, but there's an HTML version of the paper here:

https://www.cs.unm.edu/~crowley/papers/sds/sds.html

Re: The Craft of Text Editing (1999)

#9

Post by nextos »

jasonm23 wrote: post #6
cmyr wrote: post #4

I've been learning a lot lately by following along with the development of xi[1], a new text editor written in Rust. Through reading that project's RFCs I've then come across other interesting projects, like swiobe[2] and wi[3]. What are the other canonical resources on this topic? It feels like tons of the interesting thought is scattered around various blogs and usenet posts and the like. I'd love to create a nice…

REmacs is a very interesting development... https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs/blob/master/README.md

It'd be amazing if it crystallizes in a few years. Improving the old parts of Emacs, especially GUI code and low level things is a must. Rust seems like an ideal replacement for C. Great performance, much better safety guarantees.

Equally important is perhaps improving elisp concurrency. The jury is still out on whether this will happen by migrating to Guile Scheme [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/4zttlt/guileemacs_st...

Re: The Craft of Text Editing (1999)

#10

Post by ScottBurson »

dws wrote: post #7

Fun blast from the past. The original version of this shipped with Mark of the Unicorn's Mince/Scribble package for CP/M. (Mince = Mince Is Not Complete Emacs)

Glad to see someone remembers that! (I was a cofounder.)

The sources for the original version of Mince were lost long ago. It's too bad; they were very clear (thanks to the skills of Jason Linhart, the primary author, as well as Craig) and would have made a great example for study.

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