The core data structure (array of lines) just isn't that well suited to more complex operations.
Modern CPUs can read and write memory at dozens of gigabytes per second.
Even when CPUs were 3 orders of magnitude slower, text editors using a single array were widely used. Unless you introduce some accidentally-quadratic or worse algorithm in your operations, I don't think complex datastructures are necessary in this application.
lifthrasiir · 1h ago
The actual latency budget would be less than a single frame to be completely non-noticable, so you are in fact limited to less than 1 GB to move per each keystroke. And each character may hold additional metadata like syntax highlight states, so 1 GB of movable memory doesn't translate to 1 GB of text either. You are still correct in that a line-based array is enough for most cases today, but I don't think it's generally true.
akkartik · 4h ago
Funny story: using kilo was the final straw [1] in getting me to give up on terminals. These days I try to do all my programming atop a simple canvas I can draw pixels on.
Here's the text editor I use all the time these days (and base lots of forks off of): https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/text2.love. 1200 LoC, proportional font, word-wrap, scrolling, clipboard, unlimited undo. Can edit Moby Dick.
This is a problem with every TUI out there built using ncurses. "What escape code does your terminal emit for backspace?" is a completely artificial problem at this point.
There are good reasons to deal with the terminal: I need programs built for it, or I need to interface with programs built for it. Programs that deal with 1D streams of bytes for stdin and stdout are simpler in text mode. But for anything else, I try to avoid it.
Would highly recommend the tutorial as it is really well done.
ok_dad · 4h ago
Here’s a second recommendation for that tutorial. It’s the first coding tutorial I’ve finished because it’s really good and I enjoyed building the foundational software program that my craft relies on. I don’t use that editor but it was fun to create it.
90s_dev · 5h ago
Reading through this code is a veritable rite of passage. You learn how C works, how text editors work, how VT codes work, how syntax highlighting works, how find works, and how little code it really takes to make anything when you strip away almost all conveniences, edge cases, and error handling.
Although it does cheat a bit in an effort to better handle Unicode:
> unicode-width is used to determine the displayed width of Unicode characters. Unfortunately, there is no way around it: the unicode character width table is 230 lines long.
lifthrasiir · 3h ago
Personally, this is the reason I don't really buy the extreme size reduction; such projects generally have to sacrifice some essential features that demand a certain but necessary amount of code.
The core data structure (array of lines) just isn't that well suited to more complex operations.
Anyway here's what I built: https://github.com/lorlouis/cedit
If I were to do it again I'd use a piece table[1]. The VS code folks wrote a fantastic blog post about it some time ago[2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_table [2] https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2018/03/23/text-buffer-r...
Modern CPUs can read and write memory at dozens of gigabytes per second.
Even when CPUs were 3 orders of magnitude slower, text editors using a single array were widely used. Unless you introduce some accidentally-quadratic or worse algorithm in your operations, I don't think complex datastructures are necessary in this application.
Here's the text editor I use all the time these days (and base lots of forks off of): https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/text2.love. 1200 LoC, proportional font, word-wrap, scrolling, clipboard, unlimited undo. Can edit Moby Dick.
[1] https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/teliva
Why?
"Backspace is known to not work in some configurations. As a workaround, typing ctrl-h tends to work in those situations." (https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/teliva#known-issues)
This is a problem with every TUI out there built using ncurses. "What escape code does your terminal emit for backspace?" is a completely artificial problem at this point.
There are good reasons to deal with the terminal: I need programs built for it, or I need to interface with programs built for it. Programs that deal with 1D streams of bytes for stdin and stdout are simpler in text mode. But for anything else, I try to avoid it.
Would highly recommend the tutorial as it is really well done.
Although it does cheat a bit in an effort to better handle Unicode:
> unicode-width is used to determine the displayed width of Unicode characters. Unfortunately, there is no way around it: the unicode character width table is 230 lines long.
And these projects:
https://github.com/antirez/kilo/forks
go figure.
;)