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Comment by japhyr | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious if anyone here regularly codes in a text editor they wrote themselves?

I've often thought of coding one for fun, with no intention to share it, just for the purpose of having a long-term project that evolves along with my skills. I've never made time for it, but I still consider it once in a while.

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I've spent enough time tweaking, extending, and rewriting emacs lisp that I sometimes feel like I wrote my own emacs.

I still remember the first time I tried to use a vanilla emacs and was frustrated because all of my customizations were missing... ;-)

I have been careful to always carry a recent copy of my .emacs.d around with me on a thumb drive.

I do, sort of. I bought a text editor a number of years ago that was very popular. I still maintain it and use it daily and have often thought about putting out a new version. I have it running on many OS's and devices now. I have also added a lot of features specific to what I wanted. I'm not really sure if they are useful to others or not.

Example: I have an iPad version where I can use an Apple Pencil and handwrite my code on the screen. To me it is very useful when my wife is driving me someplace and I still want to work. Recline in the passenger seat and code.

That's pretty interesting, care to elaborate on how well that works? Know of any other editors that have that same capability?

I don't know of others that do this at this time. I didn't actually do any research. It is something that I wanted for myself and the way that I like to work. I prefer to hand write as much as possible. I was trying out a Surface Book just because I could hand write my e-mails!

It is working pretty well for me. I used OpenAI and basically started asking my friends to hand write samples for the NN to learn from. They write them various levels of neatness and various slants, font size, etc. I store the handwriting strokes as a series of points and convert to digital text when they are ready. I save the handwriting along side the digital version. It is possible to hand write, then come back days later and your work is still there. Maybe I could make a video to show if it is useful.

Um... Can I use it too? That sounds amazing.

really? I mean, I could probably make a version for folks to test. It only has git support and SFTP.

Committing to git currently works, push works, but sometimes says it fails. Still looking into this.

Color syntax highlighting works with your handwriting, but in the "worksheet" (an interactive shell) it does not yet.

Yea, I think it would be cool to use. The only thing I'm missing on my iPad Pro is a good way to work on programming.

alright, let me see what I can do :-) Contact me if you wish.

I wrote one back in 1984-85 that I called QEdit, and have been using and updating it ever since.

I have several former co-workers that wouldn't use anything but QEDIT/TSE.

QEdit FTW! Thank you! It was my go to editor for ages. Used it to write all my AutoCAD shareware.

It took me forever to unlearn the Wordstar key bindings.

I'll have to look it up.

Thanks for the kind words. I was forced to change the name a few years back (1992) - it is now called TSE, or The Semware Editor.

Unlearn Wordstar key bindings? Isn't that sacrilege? :-)

QEdit's configurability was amazing. Back in the early 90s I had a completely hand built config, a feat I have never dared to repeat with subsequent editors. I wrote a lot of code in it at home, and nagged my employer into buying some licenses for the sophisticated programmers among the staff (it was a bank, so not many, but a few!). I would edit locally and FTP to the server rather than use vi directly there!

When my computer illiterate aunt decided to write a book back in the early 90s, I set her up with a minimalistic QEdit, a few bat files to perform backups, versioning, etc automatically and a floppy disk for each day of the week plus a daily backup one. Simple instructions and process, simple editing setup, and two years later the 670-page book was finished and published, and she was ready to actually learn how to use a computer.

So a big thank you for creating such an excellent tool!

I made significant changes to antirez's kilo editor myself, adding in support for Lua-based scripting. I use that for composing emails, again in a lua-based mail client that I wrote myself.

For coding though? I usually use emacs. It's just so damn customizable..

Why are you posting the same thing more than once?

Different thread, related topic, same post. Didn't feel out of place.

I used to ~20 years ago. It was a curses-based mini-emacs in C; the fun part was a notebook-style interface to a Forth-like language I added in. Eventually I wanted the same kind of interface for Python programming in Emacs, and moved on to that with https://github.com/darius/halp.

I just tried halp, it seems pretty cool, thank you for making it available!

You're welcome! It does hardly anything compared to systems like IPython, but I'm reluctant to learn interfaces.

A long time ago I put some components together and built ProgEdit using Delphi, with resources that reminded me of SideKick Plus.

I've used that editor daily to write source code, mainly in Clipper, and I think some of my coworkers used that too.

But then I moved on and knew vi, and now I can't take my hands from the center row :)

ProgEdit: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cpstools/

SynEdit, the base of the editor: https://github.com/SynEdit/SynEdit (confession: I was only a user of SynEdit, not a developer).

I would not say that I use it regularly, but I have a somewhat working version of what I remember to be the Norton Editor in C++ / ncurses. It was 100% motivated by seeing antirez's artistic triumph, and my effort is sadly lacking in comparison. Still, I look at it every few weeks and add a new feature, and now I am mostly editing the code in the editor itself, which is gratifying.

I actually need to get off my duff and code what I really want, which is a version of what I remember the best parts of the Norton Editor implemented as an emacs mode. I have great memories of writing pascal code in ne.com, so it is a big nostalgia item for me.

Norton Editor.

Interesting that you mention this. I loved the Norton Editor. I have wanted to for years add a more Norton feel to the text editor that I write.

I wonder if I can still get a copy to play around with and run in a virtual machine. Any idea?

I had a copy that I found on an old floppy about 15 years ago and I tried to see if I could use it in a Windows command window, but unfortunately it did not seem to work at all. Now that you mention a virtual machine though, I regret that I did not try and setup a FreeDOS VM.

Googling "norton editor manual pdf" lead me to a few old copies of the manual, so that is what I have used as a guide in my work, but most of it is just driven by how I remember it.

You might also try dosbox, which is easier to use than a normal VM and works amazingly well.

Regularly? No, but I got https://github.com/oconnor0/build-your-own-editor to the point that I use it for small editing tasks or occasional remote work. I have a few commits that were done entirely in it. I don't think I'd use it over vi except that I wrote it and want to use it. It also has keybindings far closer to what I'm used to in Sublime Text 3.

Yes, pretty much all of my code is written in an editor called "The Hammer". It is written in DataFlex and some C++ bits and pieces.

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