On 4/30/06, Phil Jackson <phil / shellarchive.co.uk> wrote:
> On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 07:38:40AM +0900, Randy Kramer wrote:
> > On Sunday 30 April 2006 11:00 am, Phil Jackson wrote:
> > > Let me know your thoughts (which aren't allowed to include "do we really
> > > need another editor" :)).
> >
> > Ok, I won't ask that in quite that way, but:
>
> I think you may have mis-understood my question (or I didn't explain
> properly), what I was asking was more a design question than a general "I'm
> building yet another editor what do you think" question. As you took the
> time to write a response I'll answer you though (check bottom where I
> re-phase my query):
>
> >    * What is your goal for this editor--is it a learning project or intended
> > to eventually be a "product" in some sense?
>
> Both, I'm very interested in editors and find myself downloading new ones as
> they arrive and playing with them (though I'm an avid Vim user).
>
> >    * Is it to be as full-featured as Emacs or more like Notepad?
>
> Well, the idea is to write the base of the editor in C and have the API
> almost completely available to Ruby. So, theoretically, it could be as
> full-featured as Emacs or as simple as Notepad. ;)
>
> > If I was going to expend effort on an editor, I'd work on nedit.  It is
> > written in C, is very featureful and fast, etc.  It includes a C-style/based
> > macro language, keystroke recording to start macros, syntax highlighting,
> > autoindent, etc., etc., etc.
>
> To be honest I'd like to start from scratch and see what I come up with,
> secondly I _hate_ GUI based editors personally.

(I don't have an answer to your original question, however...)

You may want to have a look at "ne" (the Nice Editor).
http://ne.dsi.unimi.it/

The code looks neat and well-documented, and the editor has very good
end-user docs as well. The original author is quite a nice fellow. I
believe he no longer has the time to maintain or add features to ne.
ne may be a source of inspiration for you (or even possibly serve as a
jumping-off point). It's written in C, and is GPL'd. I'd *love* to see
it get syntax highlighting and be scriptable with Ruby. Man that would
rock. :)

---John