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Comment by AdieuToLogic | Hacker News Reader

To paraphrase The Princess Bride[0]:

  You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - the most 
  famous of which is "never get involved in a land war in 
  Asia" - but only slightly less well-known is this:

Sooner or later, wanting to write a program editor has ensnared many a skilled developer, only to find it to be a time vampire when considered anything more than an intellectual exercise.

Good luck on your journey. :-)

0 - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093779/quotes/?ref_=tt_dyk_qu

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Indeed, I was chuckling along as I read the README, as this is remarkably similar to my attempt at the same problem about 14 years ago. Though sminez seems much more skilled and motivated than I am: https://github.com/sminez/penrose

I respect the ambition. I thought I was combining chocolate and peanut butter a few times, but after sinking a few days into it, realized I was building a Homer car. All of those projects were driven by my desire for some way of interacting with some common data or whatever rather than solving a unique technical problem, so I now force myself to define a very granular UI spec and start with the front end code, and the profile of the homer car reveals itself way earlier in the process. Popping open the code editor and banging out the scaffolding for a back-end always feels so productive, but if it’s a fundamentally flawed idea, it’s very much the opposite, in reality.

I appreciate your joke, but also - it doesn't have to be so bad as that! Of all the everyday tools a developer might choose to reinvent in their own personal style, an editor is likely the easiest to complete.

I have written three different code editors over the course of my career, and the last of them I have been using every day for a long time. It is a good feeling, building tools which suit oneself perfectly!

There was a time when writing your own editor was considered a rite of passage.

Kinda like how art students copy master works and noob programmers recreate classic games (pong, space invaders, tetris, pacman, ...).

I love it when people share their rewrites, recreations.

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