Thanks for checking it out!

> Text editors to me (a web programmer) look too intimidating to build from scratch.

Honestly, this was my thinking too before I started working on one! I, like you, work primarily on web applications and I had never really worked on "lower level" projects. I have always wanted to build a text-editor, though I thought it was much too big a task and didn't know where to even start.

Because of my background in web programming, I was most comfortable with Python and JavaScript. There were a couple of popular editors out there built with JS, (mainly brackets [0]) so I decided to try read through their source code. This helped a lot. Reading source code that I understood, or atleast could make a guess at understanding. I did some research into how brackets was built and found this sort-of useful architecture video [1].

Then, I heard about the Go language, and by accident came across a project called Vigo[0] which is a Vi clone written in Go. The codebase was pretty small, and I was able to easily implement a command for the editor and contribute it. From there I just spent as much time as I could in reading source code of different editors, and comparing them to eachother. Asking myself questions like "How does Vim handle buffers compared to Emacs?" - I have no idea, so I'd go look it up. It could take weeks to get an answer, and sometimes I couldn't figure it out. But I defintely learned Something in doing the research!

I also did some reading from the authors of popular editors like Stallman (Emacs)[3] and Pike (Acme)[4]

When I started building one of my own, I still didn't really (And still dont!) know what I was doing. If you look at the early commits of the project you'll see me totally rewriting pieces over and over until as I figured out better ways of doing it.

I wish I could point you to a single resource that helped me, but it was really a bunch of things that I did over time that helped me. I still don't know much about editors, and I'm sure there's people who can do a much better job than me, but I'm having fun doing it! And I think thats the most important part. Have fun in researching editors (or whatever you decide to build). If you're interested in it, it makes even the most boring and difficult ideas fun to work with. Feel free to reach out to me too if you need help, I'm happy to share what I've learned so far!

sidenote: I didn't know Rust before I started writing Iota, which made things even more interesting ;)

[0]: https://github.com/adobe/brackets [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm9kSWZyawg [2]: https://github.com/kisielk/vigo [3]: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html [4]: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/acme/acme.html

The definitive book on implementing an EMACS, as of a long time ago, is Craig A. Finseth's The Craft of Text Editing -or- Emacs for the Modern World http://www.finseth.com/craft/

Although I can't say I used it for my work on various versions of EMACS in the '80s, I just dived into code. But everything I read in it (or its first version, I think his bachelors thesis polished into a technical memo or the like) sounded right.

As for what to do now ... well, buffer implementation tradeoffs are different, maybe ones other than buffer gap should get another look.

This is also worth looking at http://www.finseth.com/emacs.html and has a literature section.

ADDED: ah, I see tatterdemalion mentioned it elsewhere in this thread.

This is an absolutely awesome answer, and in the best tradition of old school hackers. This is why open source rules.

If you have some time - would you mind writing a high level overview of architecture/design choices that go into writing an editor?

Sure, I could give it a go!

I've been thinking about writing a few articles on my experiences so far in writing the editor. Sorta covering what I wrote above. I could definitely work in some stuff on architecture and design choices. When I get around to it, I'll post it on my blog, and most likely submit it here too. Hopefully you'll find something useful in it!

Thats a lot for the excellent answer, Greg! Really appreciate it :)

Back when I was learning to program with Java 1.0 (using the AWT, no Swing) I made a text editor that supported syntax highlighting. My first big mistake was to open my text editor's source code with my fledgling text editor and attempt to make a minor tweak, only to discover that saving had a bug and wiped out my entire program.

No I did not have any source control at the time. I just started over.

I fat-finger down-voted you. Sorry.

I upvoted purely because I saw your comment: so now the balance is restored :-)

Since he had intended to upvote but is now back at net zero, I have applied a proxy upvote.

Replying to a comment removes your vote on it, so you've put him at net +1.

I really hope that's not true. This is not Slashdot.

Any reference for that?

I took one off to restore the natural mistake.

For a cool introduction to the internals of text editors I always recommend finding the old docs for the LCC-Win32 compiler. That compiler comes with it's own IDE, and the author (Jacob Navia) did a great job of candidly documenting his mental process while developing the editor. I know the documents are kind of hard to find, so feel free to get it from my Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxF_x9mBC-n1Q0VnR3BpN21iWmc...

This document is great, it explains the internals of not just the editor but some of the compiler/linker as well. It's a shame that it was removed from newer versions of the documentation package.

Cool! Spent some time reading this last night, its very interesting. Hope to get more time in the coming days to read more of it. Thanks for sharing!

Don't wait! :)

AFAIK, there are no more planned syntactic changes before 1.0. (just library changes and some minor semantic changes)

Also, with Rustup (http://doc.rust-lang.org/guide.html#installing-rust), it is very easy to stay current with the latest rust.

With the holidays coming around the corner, now is the perfect time to dive in!

  > AFAIK, there are no more planned syntactic changes before 
  > 1.0.

I wouldn't count on this. :) The bar for breaking changes will continue to rise as we approach 1.0, but until that stable release is cut nothing is safe. Even the upcoming 1.0.0-alpha release in January will contain no concrete guarantee of syntax stability.

I second this 100%! Jump in, you won't regret it! The rust guide is a great place to start: http://doc.rust-lang.org/guide.html

The folks on the IRC channel are supper helpful too. Don't be afraid to ask!