The Last Editor I Plan to Write

Nobody plans the last editor that they'll ever write. Well, hardly anybody writes editors, these days, so perhaps N is a very small number :-)

I find VI (as delightful as it is) to be somewhat cumbersome at times. So, I had this smart search idea. It evolved into The Last Editor.

For now, here are some articles I wrote about the previous generation editor:

• Version 3
• Cracking the Editor's Back
• Shardable, O(N/m) Editor Infrastructure

What's planned

The "old" editor was written (5 times!) as an exercise to learn C++. The new editor will be a massive cleanup of the old one, with the following goals:

• better visual mode implementation
  • the current one is a mess of tangled conditions and ad-hoc code
• cleaner buffer management
• regression testing in the build
  • I hate making a change and finding out three weeks later I broke something
• new search engine (smart search)
• speed improvements
  • while there were some revolutionary ideas in the old editor (shardable listor, 2-level block-based), there are more improvements possible.