I second this 100%! Jump in, you won't regret it! The rust guide is a great place to start: http://doc.rust-lang.org/guide.html
The folks on the IRC channel are supper helpful too. Don't be afraid to ask!
504 karma · joined July 8, 2014
The folks on the IRC channel are supper helpful too. Don't be afraid to ask!
I've been thinking about writing a few articles on my experiences so far in writing the editor. Sorta covering what I wrote above. I could definitely work in some stuff on architecture and design choices. When I get around to it, I'll post it on my blog, and most likely submit it here too. Hopefully you'll find something useful in it!
I initially found it much harder to work with Rust, as the language is more strict in a number of ways. But once I began to understand how it works, and began to grasp some of its concepts such as ownership and lifetimes I found it much more powerful than Go.
Go has a larger community right now, many more libraries and resources openly available. That's probably one of Rust's downsides right now however its catching up, especially with the launch of crates.io. I don't think it will be long in maturing following the 1.0 release.
Saying that, both are enjoyable to work with. But for me Rust wins out!
> Text editors to me (a web programmer) look too intimidating to build from scratch.
Honestly, this was my thinking too before I started working on one! I, like you, work primarily on web applications and I had never really worked on "lower level" projects. I have always wanted to build a text-editor, though I thought it was much too big a task and didn't know where to even start.
Because of my background in web programming, I was most comfortable with Python and JavaScript. There were a couple of popular editors out there built with JS, (mainly brackets [0]) so I decided to try read through their source code. This helped a lot. Reading source code that I understood, or atleast could make a guess at understanding. I did some research into how brackets was built and found this sort-of useful architecture video [1].
Then, I heard about the Go language, and by accident came across a project called Vigo[0] which is a Vi clone written in Go. The codebase was pretty small, and I was able to easily implement a command for the editor and contribute it. From there I just spent as much time as I could in reading source code of different editors, and comparing them to eachother. Asking myself questions like "How does Vim handle buffers compared to Emacs?" - I have no idea, so I'd go look it up. It could take weeks to get an answer, and sometimes I couldn't figure it out. But I defintely learned Something in doing the research!
I also did some reading from the authors of popular editors like Stallman (Emacs)[3] and Pike (Acme)[4]
When I started building one of my own, I still didn't really (And still dont!) know what I was doing. If you look at the early commits of the project you'll see me totally rewriting pieces over and over until as I figured out better ways of doing it.
I wish I could point you to a single resource that helped me, but it was really a bunch of things that I did over time that helped me. I still don't know much about editors, and I'm sure there's people who can do a much better job than me, but I'm having fun doing it! And I think thats the most important part. Have fun in researching editors (or whatever you decide to build). If you're interested in it, it makes even the most boring and difficult ideas fun to work with. Feel free to reach out to me too if you need help, I'm happy to share what I've learned so far!
sidenote: I didn't know Rust before I started writing Iota, which made things even more interesting ;)
[0]: https://github.com/adobe/brackets [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm9kSWZyawg [2]: https://github.com/kisielk/vigo [3]: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html [4]: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/acme/acme.html
When I went to start writing Iota, I found that there was no termbox-type library in Rust, so I created a wrapper [1]. My goal is to create a pure-Rust version, similar to termbox-go. It's a long way from that, but it will get there!
[0]: http://github.com/kisielk/vigo [1]: http://github.com/gchp/rustbox.
I based my statement on this:
> The European Parliament has voted in favour of breaking Google up, as a solution to complaints that it favours is own services in search results.
The key part there being ..it favours its own services in search results. In my opinion they are free to rank search results in whatever manner they wish.
Google are a company who have a product (search, among many). Their product is successful (many people use search). Competitors obviously find it hard to break into the market, and want to make that easier. Is this not how business works? A company creates a product and tries to make it as popular and widely used as possible? Also, is Google not at liberty to decide how it ranks search results? Surely if they want to hide results from competitors they are allow to do that?
If my company made car tyres, and 90% of car owners in Europe used my tyres, I'd find it absolutely ludicrous if my competitors tried to break up my company because its "unfair" that I have the market share.
Google has the market share for search, whether its "unfair" or not. Competitors should work hard to push them off with their own products, not by trying to break up the organisation. Seems somewhat petty to me.
There are other arguments which are valid such as:
> How Google copies content from other websites - such as restaurant reviews - to include within its own services
Disclaimer: I don't use Google products.
Sweet, I didn't realise that. A self-hosted version would be cool. For my own projects I don't mind sending data, just for corporate work its more difficult. Having something I could run on my own machine and periodically get reports from without having to manually enter time constantly would be really handy.
I believe it would be relatively simple to calculate time locally and then display the totals in some custom Atom buffers.
Its like having to install Ruby simply because these a single Gem that you want to install and there is no other way to go about it, even if you never use Ruby for any other purpose. More of an annoyance than anything else.
Their autocomplete is second to none, however. And once that has parsed the codebase it is lightning fast. Definitely recommend giving it a try.
The only thing that I am not a big fan of though is having to install Java to run any of their IDEs. I'm not a Java developer, and have no need to install it on my system, so having to install it just to use my IDE is a bit of a pain. Small price to pay I guess for an otherwise great product.
Congrats to the team on another great-looking IDE.
The folder icon toggles between open and closed, however the files inside are not displayed. I can still open files via the command palatte, but I'd like to be able to browse via the sidebar too...
Update: My desktop environment is xubuntu 14.04.