2018-03-12 Writing an Editor

I’d like to collect some links to tutorials teaching readers how to write their own editor. These editors will necessarily be small, but perhaps they’ll be easy to adapt to your own taste.

Vip is a vi-style editor in PicoLisp.

Vip

Build Your Own Text Editor: “It’s about 1000 lines of C in a single file with no dependencies, and it implements all the basic features you expect in a minimal editor, as well as syntax highlighting and a search feature. This booklet walks you through building the editor in 184 steps.” I was super impressed when I started reading it (but I never finished it).

Build Your Own Text Editor

​#Programming ​#Software ​#Editor

kilo is a small text editor in less than 1K lines of C.

kilo

mini is a minimal editor written in Go, inspired by kilo.

mini

left is a graphical plain-text editor written in Uxntal, by @neauoire@merveilles.town.

left

grid is a graphical plain-text editor written in a Forth-like language called Gridscript and C, by @m15o@merveilles.town.

grid

merlin is a command-line powered "editor" using a stack-based, forth-esque shell language.

merlin

lines is a plain text editor that allows line drawings, by @akkartik@merveilles.town.

lines

T. Kurt Bond

The Craft of Text Editing – or – Emacs for the Modern World

I’ll have to give it a look!