March 10, 2026
Ctrl+S, Ctrl+Spicy
Writing my own text editor, and daily-driving it
One dev builds their dream editor—and the internet argues, cheers, and roasts slow apps
TLDR: A developer built and now uses their own text editor daily, ditching mainstream options. Comments erupted into a three‑way brawl: DIY pride vs modular “Lego editor” dreams vs nostalgia-fueled shade at modern slowdowns—complete with tips, jokes about no‑emoji life, and a fresh push for lean, remote‑friendly tools.
A lone coder got fed up with the usual suspects—Helix, VS Code, Vim, Emacs—and spent two years building a personal, terminal‑friendly text editor, then actually used it every day. That’s the spark; the bonfire is the comments. The community split into three loud camps: the “build it yourself” crowd flexing their handmade tools, the “glue it together” tacticians who want a mix‑and‑match editor made of small programs, and the nostalgia squad declaring 90s editors faster than anything today.
DIY pride hit hard: one commenter bragged they also run a homegrown editor and still get surprising value from it. The modular dreamers swooned over the idea of a Lego‑style setup—separate programs for search, display, and shortcuts—“one step less hardcore than writing a whole editor.” Meanwhile, the retro brigade brought the spice: tales of old Pentium‑era editors feeling “a thousand times faster” than modern bloat, with today’s features shrugged off as “yeah, but it edits multiple files.”
Amid the drama, helpful nerds chimed in with a performance tip—swap basic text storage for a faster library when big files hit. And yes, jokes flew about the author’s minimalist choices: no emoji? “As long as the £ fits, we’re fine,” became the running gag. Between remote‑friendly terminals, no reliance on LSPs (helper tools for autocompletion), and replacing nano (a simple built‑in editor) for daily chores, this story turned into a rallying cry for editing on your own terms—with equal parts applause, side‑eye, and meme energy.
Key Points
- •The author abandoned Howl due to stalled development, MoonScript maintenance burden, slow project-wide search, GUI limitations over SSH, and lack of an integrated ANSI-capable terminal.
- •After trying many editors (e.g., Helix, Vim, VS Code, Neovim, Emacs), none matched the desired workflow and feel, prompting development of a custom editor.
- •Development began two years ago with constrained scope: hard-coded preferences, string-backed buffers, limited Unicode support, and focused syntax highlighting.
- •An initial composable TUI framework was built to manage events and state but later replaced with a more direct, fine-grained approach.
- •Dogfooding was key: the custom editor replaced nano for quick/system edits, and issues were documented to guide iterative improvements.