I hadn't heard of rope data structures until I read about the xi editor (also written in Rust) a few years ago, but it looks like that's been discontinued.
In the announcement post, they mention that work on Xi is considered "on hold" rather than strictly discontinued: https://raphlinus.github.io/rust/gui/2022/05/07/ui-architect...
"I want to build an editor, but first I must solve rendering 2D graphics purely on the GPU, invent a parallelizable path solver, and code a human perception-based color value manipulation library."
I think we're at five or six levels of yaks by now.
(xi -> xilem -> masonry -> vello -> peniko -> color)
You can see the current projects (13 active) on https://linebender.org , and several members post interesting checkins in https://xi.zulipchat.com/
To be fair, the original author of Xi ('raphlinus) has been working on GPU-side 2D rendering much longer than on Xi.
[0] https://github.com/helix-editor/helix
[1] https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/blob/master/docs/archi...
I'm seriously impressed by the level of quality out of the box
The extra keypress for switching between "i" (inserting text) "ESC" (moving cursor) "i"... would drive me insane (just not used to it, but used to very fast, friction-free typing/editing).
I'll grant that Esc is further away, but it can be remapped.