My first post in four years! And, interestingly, on a similar topic as my last post.
Zed, the editor I raved about in my last post, is now essentially abandoned and unmaintained by its author. This is understandable given the direction his career has taken, but is also a bit unfortunate given its innovative approach to editing.
I've since been bouncing around using some other editors, including Atom, VS Code, and most recently Sublime Text 3. In all three cases I've configured them to function as similarly to Zed as possible, but it's never been quite right. Under the hood, all three editors still assume an "open dirty buffer" model of document management, and this leaks out from time to time.
Despite the shortcomings, I've been mostly okay with this state of affairs. But there are nevertheless some things that annoy me:
- Both Atom and VS Code are built on top of web technology. I don't like my editors taking up hundreds of megabytes of RAM with only a couple of text files open. That's just silly. And in Atom's case, it has chuggy performance to boot.
- Sublime Text isn't open source. I don't mind paying for software (and happily did in Sublime Text's case), but I always feel nervous about committing my workflow to software that doesn't belong to a larger community.
Because of these annoyances, a few years ago I developed an interest in writing my own editor. This sounds completely silly, and it pretty much is. Nevertheless, the journey of creating my own editor has been really interesting, and I've learned a lot of cool things.
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