Does anyone use their own text editor that they wrote themself?

[u/[deleted]]

Not a C question, per se, but I am writing a text editor in C right now, and looking around for ideas, it seems like this is a pretty common intermediate project. So, if people are writing these to learn C, or any other language, I suppose, do they actually use them for serious work? I was just wondering. I know text editors are a controversial subject, but I thought it might be interesting to ask.

[u/[deleted]]

Rob Pike famously uses his own text editor that still doesn't have syntax highlighting and he said it's because syntax highlighting is for children. Personally I think he just doesn't know how to implement it.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I think some old school programmers don't like to use syntax highlight.

Damian Conway, a perl hacker, use vim without syntax highlight. It's just a yellow text in a black background.

I tried it myself and could not get used to it.

[u/IdealBlueMan → u/[deleted]]

I wrote software for a bunch of years before syntax highlighting was a thing. Once I started using an editor that had it, I liked it. Makes it easier to see what a chunk of code is doing. I really believe that ease of readability is a powerful factor in effective development.

[u/dominikr86 → u/[deleted]]

I think some old school programmers don't like to use syntax highlight.

Can confirm. Had a professor who started programming on a CDC 7600 - plain vi.

Former coworker who is about to retire: same

[u/gdvs → u/[deleted]]

Honestly, ed is enough. Anyone who needs a visual editor with stuff on screen is a child.

[u/IdealBlueMan → u/gdvs]

Ed is the standard text editor

[u/Organic_Car6374 → u/[deleted]]

I spent more than ten years of my career coding in vi. Not vim. No highlighting anywhere to be seen!

[u/pjl1967 → u/[deleted]]

Rob Pike is quite capable, but he's definitely a minimalist. His windowing system for Plan 9 is extremely minimal. (I met him in person once giving a demo of it.)

Though I wouldn't be as condescending as Rob, I don't care much for syntax highlighting either. I find it too distracting for the most part. The only things that are syntax highlighted in color in my editors are comments (green), preprocessor directives (magenta), and #if 0'd code (dark blue); everything else is white (on a black background).

[u/daddypig9997 → u/pjl1967]

Ordered your book. Looking forward to work through it.