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Comment by thomasdziedzic | Hacker News Reader

How timely, I just finished going through a tutorial that builds a text editor like kilo from scratch: https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/index.html

Would highly recommend the tutorial as it is really well done.

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I remember that tutorial fondly.

I played around with kilo when it was released, and eventually made a multi-buffer version with support for scripting with embedded Lua. Of course it was just a fun hack not a serious thing, I continue to do all my real editing with Emacs, but it did mean I got to choose the best project name:

https://github.com/skx/kilua

Here’s a second recommendation for that tutorial. It’s the first coding tutorial I’ve finished because it’s really good and I enjoyed building the foundational software program that my craft relies on. I don’t use that editor but it was fun to create it.

This is one of my favorite moderate-level projects for playing with different programming languages.

The original in C: https://git.timshomepage.net/tutorials/kilo

Go: https://git.timshomepage.net/timw4mail/gilo

Rust: https://git.timshomepage.net/timw4mail/rs-kilo

And the more rusty tutorial version (Hecto): https://git.timshomepage.net/tutorials/hecto

PHP: https://git.timshomepage.net/timw4mail/php-kilo

...and Typescript: https://git.timshomepage.net/timw4mail/scroll

Author of hecto here, thank you for mentioning it! I wrote the first version around 5 years ago and I’m happy that people still use it. (I updated it in the meantime)

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