"The editor is written as if it's a game, so it will probably eat up your battery, as well as run possibly quite slow - especially if you dont have a dedicated GPU - and probably crash frequently."
Can't quite understand what it wants to be, a fast editor that's minimal or one that's like a game and kills my battery and run slow?
> Incredibly high performance. All editing operations should commit and paint in under 16ms. The editor should never make you wait for anything.
> Reliability. Crashing, hanging, or losing work should never happen.
I think the Phi page is just including "current state of editor" as well as "aimed for state of editor" in the README.
It can be a minimal and fast editor in terms of text operations.
It can be a heavy and slow editor in terms of screen rendering.
There is no inherent reason why, as it matures, it couldn’t become lighter and faster overall compared to other editors, since it actually uses available modern hardware.
The problem is that not enough people/money are thrown at the problem.
Microsoft has done wonders with VSC with its big team -- but in the end of the day it's Node and DOM based.
Imagine what something like ST would be, if it wasn't an one-man effort.
Talking about editors that do crazy stuff, I have a story about the de-facto text editor in Vietnam in the 80s-90s called BKED. That editor runs on MS-DOS and looks just like edit.com [1], except for it displays and allows the user to input text in Vietnamese. Nothing really quite special at the first glance.
The Vietnamese alphabet is Latin-extended, and it needs about 100 or so extra characters (caps included) besides the standard Latin alphabet. Thankfully, the extended ASCII character set (code 128-255) was just barely enough to hold the extended Vietnamese alphabet.
Consequently, the obvious way to solve the problem of displaying Vietnamese on DOS was to override and redraw the character set in the VGA-compatible text mode [2]. Its rivaling editor, called VietRES, did just that. With some other TSR hooks [3], VietRES made it possible for any text or TUI program on DOS to display and accept Vietnamese. You might have guessed it, RES stands for RESident. However, it has a drawback that is it messed up the TUI of many programs because it had to override almost all of the extended ASCII characters, most notably table-drawing characters. It was an inevitable problem if you ever want to display Vietnamese characters with just ASCII. The problem carried on to even Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. Our Windows-based Vietnamese support program at that time overwrote the MS Sans Serif and turned every '®' in every software install package to an 'â'. Many other character sets had this problem, for example, in Japanese, the '\' was turned into the Yen symbol.
Two years ago I thought about BKED and realized that BKED had no problems drawing tables. It could even display bold and italic characters at the same time alongside with regular characters. When I tried to run it on DOSBox, it was clear that BKED did something really clever to get around that. First I thought it might have used the secondary table or something. So I updated my status on Facebook praising whatever the author did. The author of the software -- now an old man -- somehow is a friend of a friend of mine, saw that and chimed in. He said his editor doesn't run in textmode. My mind was blown! It is a full-blown graphical program in Hercules/CGA/EGA/VGA graphics and just pretends to be a text-mode program. It draws every single character in its UI. It had to do it very quickly and economically -- computers in Vietnam at the time were all old secondhand ones imported from the US recycle centers and such. Now as I looked at it more, it was no surprise to me it could also do quite sophisticated mathematical formulas [4]. Thanks to its flexibility, the editor was used to typeset the whole suite of national textbooks on every subject in the 90s. The author also wrote another textbook about Turbo Pascal for college students. Indeed that book was the first I read on programming and Pascal was the first language I learned when I was 12. His work and contribution were well paid off -- he is now a very high-ranking official in the National Ministry of Education.
The editor was never open-sourced. I just got his email a month ago. If nothing else, I will ask him to release this gem to our future generations to enjoy.
1: https://i.imgur.com/RZN50oS.jpg
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VGA-compatible_text_mode
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminate_and_stay_resident_pr...
Remember the BKAV splash screen with the running green man in DOS? I have never wondered why a TUI program like BKAV would bother going around just to make a graphical screen just to display a useless running man. Now as I thought about it, it perhaps was because the author faced the same issue, so it's just another graphical program pretending to be a textmode one. The running man is perhaps just because he could do it while he was at it.
I guess I really just meant tedious when I mentioned that kind of work. It's not the kind of usual engineering solution when one first thought about the issue at hand. It breaks most usual assumption about how you solve the problem. It's like when someone writes the whole website in javascript and canvas just to display text because they can't do certain things in HTML.
M68k 7.16Mhz/8MHz Amiga's didn't have a text mode.
The amount of data to copy to scroll text wasn't that huge even in graphics modes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-Write
Which had ways to load in alternative charsets ..
I have some trouble understanding the rationale for using SDL_ttf in an editor implementation, though. Did you just cut shaping, bidirectional text and font fallback as acceptable losses, or is it on the roadmap? If so, what is your strategy?
