Text Editor

I've been thinking about text editors, Aedit in particular. Aedit was like the first text editor I really got to know. This was back in the early 1980s and we were using Intel blue box development machines that the company was renting from Intel for the astronomical price of a thousand dollars a month, least ways that's the way I remember it.

I kept using Aedit when I went to work for Intel. I spent, I dunno, five or ten years using it. Then Windows came on the scene with their fancy schmantzy bullshit and I got to learn a whole new way way or ruining my life. 

So here we are 30 years later and I am still pining for my lost Aedit text editor. Then I got to thinking that I should probably just write my own. I mean, how tough can it be? So now I'm thinking about this and I start thinking about different ways of storing text in memory. Do we do it by the line, or maybe strings, or just as one big block of text? This leads to the question of how do you handle the case where the text it too large to fit in memory? Kind of an unlikely scenario, I know, given the amount of memory modern computers have, but Aedit ran in like 64KB and could Handle any size file. Well, any size you could fit on a disk and our 8 inch hard disks were only 10MB. I do remember tackling files that were over one megabyte and Aedit did not complain. It might have gotten a little slow, but it handled the file just fine. So now I'm wondering how would I handle a multi-terabyte file. That is probably a ridiculous case, but if you are going to allow a program to handle large files, someone is going to push it to the limit, so you need to be prepared.

And then I thought: I wonder if maybe somebody else has already done this, and lo and behold, they have:

Port of Aedit to C

Using the source of Aedit shared on https://github.com/abiliojr/aedit.git, the code here is an attempt to port from PLM to C and to support newer operating systems.

So now I have another reason to get myself in gear and get a new Linux box and get away from this stinky Chromebox.