I recently had some life events that gave me a bit of time
to sit around at a computer (something I have not done a
whole lot of lately, both out of time concern and out of
lack of interest). Some time ago I followed a walkthrough
on writing a text editor based on kilo by antirez. It was
in C and I had fun working on it. A while after that I
ported it over to go. My version was always very vim/vi
inspired. So, with the time I had available I decided I
wanted to be able to use my own editor for actual real
work that I do. I do a lot of ebook editing. All of that
work uses utf-8 text (beyond the ascii set).

I finally got around to doing a ground up rewrite to
support utf-8. I also added windowing; though a cheap way
of doing it where only two windows are allowed (which is
enough for me and a BIG improvement on the tabbed
interface I had built for the prior version). I also added
regex-based search and replace, line numbers (relative or
standard), support for sending commands to a shell and
having the response open in a new buffer, a better macro
system, the ability to input regularly used utf-8 chars from
insert mode (similar to vim's ^K), and a check for if a
file has been modified from another process.

I removed runtime configuration (having a config file) and
theme support. Instead, there is a `config.go` file that
can be edited at compile time to reasonable defaults. I
also removed support for most filetype-based syntax
highlighting. I do have code for single line comments and
strings based on filetype, but they are hard coded. I do
not highlight multiline comments or keywords. Instead I
just do single line comments, strings, numbers, and symbols.
The last category lets me easily spot code boundaries by
highlighting brackets, parents, equal signs, etc. All single
char stuff. I have found I do not really miss the highlighting
of other things.

I wrote _most_ of the editor in the editor, and have not
used it to write some other stuff. The only thing I do
not have is soft-wrap for long lines, a feature I dearly miss
but have not worked out in my head how to accomplish quite
yet. Someday maybe. Until then, horizontal scroll is not
the end of the world.

The editor always had undo functionality, and still does.

It remains a nice thing to make a tool that you can use
yourself and modify to your needs and every now and then
redo it and make it better.

While it is really something I imagine will only interest me,
the code is here:

https://tildegit.org/sloum/sled2

It uses a rune-width lib and a readline-esque lib, other than
that it is just the standard library.