Irenes (many)we gave in to the urge to start writing a text editor https://code.irenes.space/ivy
(it doesn't edit anything yet)
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)
rudi@ireneista how will you represent files in-memory? I think strings usually assume some valid encoding, and text files are crazy.
(In a former life I was the guy ppl came to with “we don’t know how to read this file, pls fix” and I’d find out parts of it were in some old Russian encoding and convert the lot to utf8)
@rudi oh, bytes, as far as that goes. we've been writing our own encoding-handling code because we care about not losing valid bytes during error recovery, and passing through invalid bytes unmodified, and stuff like that.
but that's not even the hard part, the hard part is that it's an editor and vectors are overly confining for that use.
@rudi wasn't it an amazing fun prank on all of us in the future how the various ISO-Latin encodings use the same codepoint for all the various currency symbols?
@ireneista it just makes me appreciate more what we have now. Unicode is messy because history but utf-8 is a marvel