I read recently that a guy called Daniel Lucraft has written a text-editor in Ruby called Redcar. It was a relieft to see that there is more than one person silly enough to do what I have spent the last couple of months doing.
My editor is called Icepin. Here is a screen-shot (click for full-size):
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Daniel's editor is a clone of TextMate for Gnome. Icepin is a clone of Emacs for Mac/Linux/whatever using the wxRuby toolkit. I did not look at the Emacs source-code at all, but have certainly copied many of the things that I like about Emacs. Icepin is 100% pure Ruby.
So why, you may ask, have I wasted countless hours building my own editor when there are so many excellent editors available? Why does anyone do anything, I guess. Personally, I loved using Emacs because of the huge number of available modules. However...
...there was a plugin that I was using called yasnippet that had a bug in it (which is now fixed). I tried to fix it myself and realized that as much as I tried, I really couldn't learn to love LISP. I really want to love it, I promise, but I am possibly just not smart enough to program anything useful in it.
My day job is Ruby programming and I am fairly comfortable with it. So the obvious choice would be to use TextMate, which allows you to write extensions in Ruby/Python/etc. However TextMate does not have split windows, and I really cannot live without them. TextMate 2 (with split windows) seems to be vapourware.
As you can see from my screenshot, IcePin has split windows. It has basic editing features, unlimited undo, search/replace, syntax highlighting, unlimited buffers and that is about it. It is about 5x as good as Windows Notepad, as opposed to about 100x to 1000x as good for most popular editors (TextMate, Emacs, vim, etc). I am guessing that it is nowhere near as powerful as Daniel Lucraft's Redcar editor, but I haven't had the chance to try his out.
I haven't added a new feature to IcePin in about 3 weeks and I think I may have become bored with it. I have been using it exclusively for all my programming since the start of the year (when it was two weeks old, called Roomacs and running in a terminal using ncurses) and I must say it is fun to use your own software all day. It is also nice to be the only user world-wide, in a strange way. Now it is at the stage that it does everything that I need, I think I will leave it for a while and play with another pet project.
My editor is called Icepin. Here is a screen-shot (click for full-size):
Daniel's editor is a clone of TextMate for Gnome. Icepin is a clone of Emacs for Mac/Linux/whatever using the wxRuby toolkit. I did not look at the Emacs source-code at all, but have certainly copied many of the things that I like about Emacs. Icepin is 100% pure Ruby.
So why, you may ask, have I wasted countless hours building my own editor when there are so many excellent editors available? Why does anyone do anything, I guess. Personally, I loved using Emacs because of the huge number of available modules. However...
...there was a plugin that I was using called yasnippet that had a bug in it (which is now fixed). I tried to fix it myself and realized that as much as I tried, I really couldn't learn to love LISP. I really want to love it, I promise, but I am possibly just not smart enough to program anything useful in it.
My day job is Ruby programming and I am fairly comfortable with it. So the obvious choice would be to use TextMate, which allows you to write extensions in Ruby/Python/etc. However TextMate does not have split windows, and I really cannot live without them. TextMate 2 (with split windows) seems to be vapourware.
As you can see from my screenshot, IcePin has split windows. It has basic editing features, unlimited undo, search/replace, syntax highlighting, unlimited buffers and that is about it. It is about 5x as good as Windows Notepad, as opposed to about 100x to 1000x as good for most popular editors (TextMate, Emacs, vim, etc). I am guessing that it is nowhere near as powerful as Daniel Lucraft's Redcar editor, but I haven't had the chance to try his out.
I haven't added a new feature to IcePin in about 3 weeks and I think I may have become bored with it. I have been using it exclusively for all my programming since the start of the year (when it was two weeks old, called Roomacs and running in a terminal using ncurses) and I must say it is fun to use your own software all day. It is also nice to be the only user world-wide, in a strange way. Now it is at the stage that it does everything that I need, I think I will leave it for a while and play with another pet project.