Build Your Own Text Editor (2017)

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com
Terminal Awesomewm code-editor Lua text-editor

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  • dart_console

    Dart library for writing console applications

    • Me too. It started a whole chain of events for me:

    - I used the tutorial to write it in Dart (https://github.com/timsneath/dart_console/blob/main/example/...)

  • kiro-editor

    A terminal UTF-8 text editor written in Rust 📝🦀

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

    InfluxDB logo

  • gram

    A no-dependency, terminal editor

    • I did this a few months ago in Golang and it was so much fun. Can 100% recommend.

    Shameless plug -> https://github.com/Jeadie/gram

  • awesome

    awesome window manager (by awesomeWM)

    • Wow, didn't expect to prompt such a long rant :)

    I think you're raising a couple important questions here, but I believe building apps that are actually frameworks is a trap.

    Have you looked at Awesome (https://awesomewm.org/)? It's a window manager that actually advertises itself as a framework. It has a default example config, that you can just completely ignore, and instead, use the API to build your own WM from scratch, using high-level primitives such as windows and tags, rather than having to deal with X11/XCB directly.

    I've used Awesome a lot in the 3.x days, and one of the major pain points was always upgrading. My old config (only slightly adapted from the default) would regularly break between minor releases. It was an experience similar to upgrading Django projects - something I'd charge money for nowadays, not inflict upon myself voluntarily.

    I have a similar experience with Emacs, I'd rather have a 10 line config and sane defaults than a 10k line program that I end up working on more often than on my actual projects. If not for magit, I'd have switched to VS Code a long time ago.

    I'm afraid most frameworks-disguised-as-apps end up this way. I want the exact opposite - a simple GUI framework, with a native feel, that makes writing simple apps (such as the text editor from TFA) - as simple, as banging out escape codes to stdout, but without emulating half a century of technical debt. And nope, using a web browser for that purpose doesn't fit my definition of simple ;)

    BTW feel free to reply on email if you feel constrained by HN post length.

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