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Comment by aloer | Hacker News Reader

How would you recommend someone to get started learning about the architecture of Text editors / word processors?

I think Monaco from vscode is probably an interesting read but I’ve never looked at such a big open source code base before.

Is there something you can recommend to understand better how it works architecturally?

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There is no substitute to building one yourself, but The Craft of Text Editing book has a lot of accumulated wisdom. It is Emacs-centric, but basics are same.

http://www.finseth.com/craft/

One of my first programming projects as a teenager back in terminal-type days was to write my own text editor for the Atari ST. I was super happy with it, and sold three (3) copies of it! That made me very happy at the time.

Of course there was that time that I messed with the save/load code and destroyed the text files of one of my customers. Not so happy with that! Saved it by writing a fix system, and that actually led to being hired at that guy's company for my first "real" job. ;)

Former ST user here: out of curiosity, what was that text editor and company?

Ahahaha! You said company. ;) It was just me, a teenage kid, selling to people who came through the store I worked at selling computers (the store sold the Atari line).

I called it DEdit, because every programmer wants to grab a single letter title.

I'd love to have a good answer for you, but I learned the basics all the way back in the '80s. Seems like I've seen references posted occasionally on HN, hopefully someone has a good link.

There were a few really interesting blog posts about the architecture choices for the xi editor a few years ago, ending with this

https://raphlinus.github.io/xi/2020/06/27/xi-retrospective.h...

But I personally never worked on this kind of problem, I just remember reading these over the years

Here’s a blog post detailing some vscode internals: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2018/03/23/text-buffer-r...

I recommend reading about the internals of CodeMirror and ProseMirror: e.g. https://codemirror.net/1/story.html.

I don't think there's any way better than build a text editor from scratch, you have to understand the exact problem before reading other people's solutions.

Might this be helpful? I recall seeing this on HN awhile back.

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