Show HN: Iota – a text editor written in Rust (opens in new tab)

Back when I was learning to program with Java 1.0 (using the AWT, no Swing) I made a text editor that supported syntax highlighting. My first big mistake was to open my text editor's source code with my fledgling text editor and attempt to make a minor tweak, only to discover that saving had a bug and wiped out my entire program.

No I did not have any source control at the time. I just started over.

Thanks for checking it out!

> Text editors to me (a web programmer) look too intimidating to build from scratch.

Honestly, this was my thinking too before I started working on one! I, like you, work primarily on web applications and I had never really worked on "lower level" projects. I have always wanted to build a text-editor, though I thought it was much too big a task and didn't know where to even start.

Because of my background in web programming, I was most comfortable with Python and JavaScript. There were a couple of popular editors out there built with JS, (mainly brackets [0]) so I decided to try read through their source code. This helped a lot. Reading source code that I understood, or atleast could make a guess at understanding. I did some research into how brackets was built and found this sort-of useful architecture video [1].

Then, I heard about the Go language, and by accident came across a project called Vigo[0] which is a Vi clone written in Go. The codebase was pretty small, and I was able to easily implement a command for the editor and contribute it. From there I just spent as much time as I could in reading source code of different editors, and comparing them to eachother. Asking myself questions like "How does Vim handle buffers compared to Emacs?" - I have no idea, so I'd go look it up. It could take weeks to get an answer, and sometimes I couldn't figure it out. But I defintely learned Something in doing the research!

I also did some reading from the authors of popular editors like Stallman (Emacs)[3] and Pike (Acme)[4]

When I started building one of my own, I still didn't really (And still dont!) know what I was doing. If you look at the early commits of the project you'll see me totally rewriting pieces over and over until as I figured out better ways of doing it.

I wish I could point you to a single resource that helped me, but it was really a bunch of things that I did over time that helped me. I still don't know much about editors, and I'm sure there's people who can do a much better job than me, but I'm having fun doing it! And I think thats the most important part. Have fun in researching editors (or whatever you decide to build). If you're interested in it, it makes even the most boring and difficult ideas fun to work with. Feel free to reach out to me too if you need help, I'm happy to share what I've learned so far!

sidenote: I didn't know Rust before I started writing Iota, which made things even more interesting ;)

[0]: https://github.com/adobe/brackets [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm9kSWZyawg [2]: https://github.com/kisielk/vigo [3]: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html [4]: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/acme/acme.html

I fat-finger down-voted you. Sorry.

For a cool introduction to the internals of text editors I always recommend finding the old docs for the LCC-Win32 compiler. That compiler comes with it's own IDE, and the author (Jacob Navia) did a great job of candidly documenting his mental process while developing the editor. I know the documents are kind of hard to find, so feel free to get it from my Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxF_x9mBC-n1Q0VnR3BpN21iWmc...

This document is great, it explains the internals of not just the editor but some of the compiler/linker as well. It's a shame that it was removed from newer versions of the documentation package.

Don't wait! :)

AFAIK, there are no more planned syntactic changes before 1.0. (just library changes and some minor semantic changes)

Also, with Rustup (http://doc.rust-lang.org/guide.html#installing-rust), it is very easy to stay current with the latest rust.

With the holidays coming around the corner, now is the perfect time to dive in!

I actually contributed quite a bit to a fork of godit called vigo [0]. It gave me lots of insight into how text editors work.

When I went to start writing Iota, I found that there was no termbox-type library in Rust, so I created a wrapper [1]. My goal is to create a pure-Rust version, similar to termbox-go. It's a long way from that, but it will get there!

[0]: http://github.com/kisielk/vigo [1]: http://github.com/gchp/rustbox.

Makes me think, when guile-emacs will be done, rust will be mature enough so we (by we I mean they) can rewrite emacs c core in it.

What's the advantage of using the limited termbox interface over (n)curses, or just using the low-level terminfo library directly?

Thanks! It's still very much a work-in-progress, but I like it so far. Plus its been really fun writing it.

I don't get what a Rust GUI would give you, in this case?

Its true that Rustbox uses C code right now. Its just a wrapper around the original termbox library. My goal for rustbox is to be a full Rust port of termbox, removing the reliance on C. Hadn't heard of busybox, will check it out. Thanks!

There's a core-utils in rust repo https://github.com/uutils/coreutils

I haven't, this is the first time I've heard of it. Will definitely check it out though, thanks!

Thanks for checking it out! Rust is really exciting, I'm looking forward to seeing what the community can do with it.

Thank you! In my experience it hasn't been very unstable. Every now and again something will change that will break things, but that's become more and more infrequent. Overall, rust is great!

Thank you!