we gave in to the urge to start writing a text editor https://code.irenes.space/ivy

(it doesn't edit anything yet)

ivy - Warm, friendly modal text editor for the terminal.

this is our first time using the Rust smol library, which seems quite nice. pleasingly, there isn't some big war between the authors of different rust async runtimes; rather, roughly the same group of authors wrote first tokio, then async-std, then most recently smol. this last one refactors the whole thing into a bunch of tiny, loosely-coupled libraries; smol itself is just a shorthand to import a few of those libraries at once. so that's pretty neat.
thus far we have two direct dependencies and 35 transitive ones, which we're pretty pleased with, that seems nice and small to us
we have partially-implemented versions of the hjkl commands pushed, now. it's time to add an abstraction we've been really looking forward to, a helper that handles movement commands...
so in case you're keeping track of how long a project of ours can exist before we feel the need to use async closures, the answer is about three hours, 40 minutes

neat. we found and fixed a bug in our function that iterates through the file and keeps track of byte offsets to each line. it wasn't properly handling empty lines.

... see, finding a bug like that feels like progress to us because it demonstrates that the abstraction is doing the things we think it is, and when it fails it was just a minor tweak needed

like it makes us more confident of the approach than we were before

(we are way over-read on text editor implementation strategies, like in our body's early 20s our system read dozens of papers about it, so it's not like we really need more confidence, but hey)

(we're going to eventually use a buffer gap, but right this moment it's just a single consecutive buffer)
@ireneista unsolicited, but you might also be interested in piece tables instead of buffer gap. Lots of interesting tricks you can do with them including baking undo directly into the buffer representation. Also allows you to mmap the initial load, and edits don't require loading anything new off the disk.

pho.spookygirl.boo/source/media-thing/browse/default/packages/text/src/PieceTable.ts;87712c3f45c29b96e6e6c0fdf15855f62a47f805?as=source&blame=off - a typescript version. I've got a paper lying around that describes them too.
PieceTable.ts · media-thing

@amy ah yeah it's worth considering, thanks for that