Lately I’ve been playing around with the idea of creating a text editor. Here’s a very quick and basic overview of what I think it should contain. The text editor has extensions, managers, projects, and a core API.

The Editor has Extensions

For example, a user wants the editor (TE) to integrate with pandoc in some way. Or, they may want a spell checker. The user could write an extension, which behaves as additional behaviour of the API. It expands the types of calls that can be made to the API.

The Editor has Managers

The core API makes no assumptions about how the user would like to display their content. A manager must be written for every display method (the web, desktop, etc).

The Editor has Projects

Projects are introduced as an abstract type: a project may be anything. For example, in the case of a Jekyll project, there is a root directory (the website), some configuration information, certain commands that must be run to generate and manage the site, and so on. These can be defined in a Project, eg:

    class Project:
        def __init__(self, ..., ...):
	...
		
    class Jekyll(Project):
	def __init__(self, root_dir, ruby_dir, ...):
	...
		
	def create_post(self, ...):
	    title = "%s-%s-%s-%s.%s".format(year, month, day, title, file_type)
	    ...

A project can be less complicated. They can be an analogue to major modes in emacs; there may be a markdown project. In this case, the markdown extension might be loaded, and the pandoc extension could be available to convert from markdown to PDF.

The Editor has an API

The API must supply certain basic functionality. A buffer can be created, edited, and saved. Furthermore, the buffer is available to extensions. Managers and Projects have no direct access to the buffer, they must query the API.

How is The Editor different from Emacs?

I feel The Editor fills a role Emacs does not. Extensible with Python rather than Elisp, project management (multiple directories) with different major modes, more web-friendly API. Emacs of course has all of these things in theory, but not without a lot of customization that I wish to mitigate.

How is The Editor different from Atom?

I haven’t used atom in some time. However, I ran into similar problems of extensibility and nodejs, and project management.

You’re Wrong; My Favourite Editor is Better

There is nothing wrong with Atom or Sublime, and I love Emacs. All of those editors are hugely customizable, expertly built, and loaded with features. My main motivation is not to disrupt the editor habitat. I wanted to work on a project, and this seemed like a cool thing to try out. We’ll see how it goes. Wish me luck!