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Comment by cmyr | Hacker News Reader

I've been learning a lot lately by following along with the development of xi[1], a new text editor written in Rust. Through reading that project's RFCs I've then come across other interesting projects, like swiobe[2] and wi[3].

What are the other canonical resources on this topic? It feels like tons of the interesting thought is scattered around various blogs and usenet posts and the like. I'd love to create a nice collection of good writing on text-editing / tools, but I'm not sure where to start.

[1] https://github.com/google/xi-editor

[2] https://github.com/swiboe/swiboe

[3] https://github.com/wi-ed/wi

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Kakoune[1] has been posted recently here on HN to great reception. As a C++ developer, I think it has a very high quality codebase, especially considering how non-trivial it is. As a user, it's been my main text editor for over a year. It also has a vibrant community, jump in on IRC if you have questions or ideas.

[1] https://github.com/mawww/kakoune

I think getting Kakoune UI support into Xi would be a very interesting project…

Are you talking about Xi as a frontend for kakoune? If it's the UI part that you're interested in, there is also kakoune-qml[1] made by one of the regular uses.

[1] https://github.com/doppioandante/kakoune-qml

I think creating a Xi frontend that mimicked Kakoune's modal keybindings and highlighting would be an interesting exercise, and probably stretch the set of supported ideas in Xi in a good way.

REmacs is a very interesting development...

https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs/blob/master/README.md

It'd be amazing if it crystallizes in a few years. Improving the old parts of Emacs, especially GUI code and low level things is a must. Rust seems like an ideal replacement for C. Great performance, much better safety guarantees.

Equally important is perhaps improving elisp concurrency. The jury is still out on whether this will happen by migrating to Guile Scheme [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/4zttlt/guileemacs_st...

I believe Rust is too young a language to replace C in Emacs. I'd be happier if it was a standardised, time-tested language with a large user base and lots of docs.

Rust is standardized with lots of docs. The rest two will come with time.

It's still moving fast and breaking things in ways that---while necessary---aren't reasonable choices for programs like Emacs or TeX. These programs need to run the same way in 20 years, and be runnable the same way in 50.

Sam comes to mind as an interesting project in this area:

http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/sam/

Too reliant on the mouse.

There is some theory of operation stuff for JOE:

https://sourceforge.net/p/joe-editor/mercurial/ci/default/tr...

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