Text editor theory

data-structures editor text-editor theory
lornova picture lornova · Jul 3, 2010 · Viewed 10.9k times · Source

As I'm always dissatisfied with existing editors, a project I always wanted to start is my own text editor. However doing text editing is serious business.

Besides analyzing the source code of existing text editors, is there any book or other resource (like academic work) about this topic? I'm interested especially in something that teaches how to handle memory and how to manage text insertion (if you have a 100 MB file and want to add a char at x position, you can't just memmove the huge text block...).

Answer

Corbin March picture Corbin March · Jul 3, 2010

Take a look at Rob Pike's description of his Sam text editor. Be sure to browse past the high-level overview and command language. He describes parsing, memory management, and data structures later in the paper.

In addition, take a look at Russ Cox's simple regular expression implementation. It's easy to follow and may open some doors outside existing regular expression libraries.

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