The Joy of Building Your Own Text Editor: A Developer’s Journey

Breaking News: Developer Creates Custom Text Editor After Years of Searching for the Perfect Tool

In a world where developers spend countless hours staring at their screens, one programmer has taken the bold step of creating their own text editor after years of dissatisfaction with existing solutions. What started as a personal project has now become a fully functional tool that the developer claims has reignited their passion for programming.

The Problem: A Decade of Frustration

For nearly ten years, the developer relied on Howl, a lightweight text editor that seemed perfect at first glance. However, several critical issues emerged over time:

• Development stagnation: The editor’s development had been dead for years, leaving the programmer maintaining their own fork
• Performance issues: Project-wide file searches would cause the editor to choke, disrupting workflow
• Remote access limitations: Being a GUI editor, it couldn’t be easily run over SSH connections
• Missing features: No integrated terminal support, limiting ANSI escape code functionality

The Search for Alternatives

Before embarking on their own creation, the developer tested numerous alternatives including Helix, VS Code, Sublime Text, Vim, Zed, Neovim, Emacs, and several others. Each had its strengths, but none possessed that elusive “fingerspitzengefühl” – the intuitive feel that makes a tool truly exceptional.

The Solution: Building from Scratch

The custom editor, built over the past two years, represents a triumph of personal need over conventional wisdom. The developer started small, deliberately excluding features that didn’t serve their specific workflow:

• No toggle switches or preferences – everything is hard-coded
• Performance optimization deferred until problems arise
• Limited Unicode support (sufficient for monolingual users)
• Syntax highlighting focused on a small pool of frequently used languages

Key Features and Innovations

The Revolutionary File Browser

One of the standout features is the file browser, which the developer describes as “joyous” to use. Unlike many editors that force users to guess file names or reach for the mouse, this implementation offers:

• Instant fuzzy filtering that typically finds files within 2-3 keystrokes
• Inline file creation without switching menus
• Automatic directory navigation with shortcuts like ~/
• Live preview of files before opening

The search algorithm is surprisingly simple yet effective, ranking files by whether they start with the filter phrase, contain it, and their modification time.

Custom Regex Engine

Understanding the critical importance of performance for project-wide search and syntax highlighting, the developer implemented a custom regex engine with several optimizations:

• Single-pass optimization for common patterns
• Prefix discovery to reduce matching operations
• Threaded code VM implementation
• Continuation-passing style conversion
• Byte-level operations where possible

The result? Full syntax highlighting of a 50,000-line Rust file in under 10 milliseconds – faster than most screens can refresh.

Demand-Driven Highlighting

Rather than rehighlighting entire files on every change, the editor uses a cache system that highlights tokens on-demand in equally sized chunks. This approach is remarkably efficient, especially when editing large files, as it preserves highlighting state before the edit point and doesn’t bother highlighting content far below the visible area.

Multi-Threaded Project Search

The project search functionality uses a work-stealing approach across multiple threads, with an innovative mechanism to detect when all threads have finished producing work. Combined with the optimized regex engine and fast SSDs, searches complete almost instantly even in large codebases.

Terminal Integration

By leveraging the alacritty_terminal crate, the editor gained robust terminal emulation capabilities without the developer needing to implement complex ANSI parsing from scratch. This integration makes the editor a viable replacement for screen or tmux.

Smart Rendering

Even as a TUI-based application, the editor employs double-buffering and damage detection to minimize terminal output. This results in faster performance than native terminal applications when dealing with large files.

The Results: More Than Just a Tool

The developer reports that creating their own editor has delivered benefits far beyond having a customized tool:

• Perfect fit: The editor does exactly what they want, nothing more, nothing less
• Deep learning: Gained comprehensive understanding of regex, ANSI, UTF-8, TUI design, and more
• Increased productivity: Less time fighting the tool, more time thinking about code
• Renewed passion: Rediscovering the joy of programming and smiling while coding again

Conclusion: The Case for DIY Tools

The developer challenges the conventional wisdom that building your own tools is “pointless pain,” arguing instead that for motivated engineers, it offers significant advantages. The key is to embrace the challenge rather than offload difficult problems to libraries.

As the developer puts it: “Go make your own tools! It needn’t be a text editor. And, for god’s sake, enjoy the challenge and resist the urge to push the difficult bits off to a box of statistics. There is joy in struggle.”

tags: text editor, programming, development tools, custom software, productivity, regex optimization, TUI design, terminal emulator, project search, syntax highlighting

viral sentences:

• “There is joy in struggle”
• “Software is joy”
• “Building my editor required building up a deep understanding”
• “Knowing your own tool back to front”
• “I have found myself grinning manically and chuckling to myself while programming”
• “It’s reignited some of the love for programming”
• “For the motivated engineer, there are a lot of advantages”
• “Resist the urge to push the difficult bits off to a box of statistics”
• “There’s nothing like solving a lot of neat, self-contained problems”
• “A programmer’s text editor is their castle”

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