Ask HN: Anyone using their own custom text editor?
9 vasko 4 8/30/2025, 2:48:55 PM
I don't think I've ever been truly happy with a text editor, the closes I got is my current neovim setup that has just way too many plugins but it still just isn't quite what I want.
So I thought, how hard could it be to write one? Anyone gone down this road before?
https://www.github.com/marssaxman/ozette/
If I did it over again, I might use a rope instead of a line array as the central data structure, but it works well enough that I've never bothered to change it.
https://github.com/Akuli/porcupine
What I learned is it's fairly simple to make a text editor - but there's also the occasional fiddly little bug that has to be sorted out. (It could've also had security holes -- it was protected by obscurity...)
I was frustrated with downtime at my blogging site at the time -- but in the end I just switched to "live-editing" my blog posts directly on the server using Pico.