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Re: Editor design & Buffer Gap

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Anthony Howe <achowe@snert.com> writes:

> On 2026-10-12 17:42, steve g wrote:
>> Anthony Howe <achowe@snert.com> writes:
>> 
>> 
>>> The designing the edit engine is what fascinates me, regardless of UI.  Pity
>>> there are few discussions any more around this topic.
>> I agree. I would love to play with a redisplay engine. let alone read
>> more about them. I usually just read some old pascal books from the
>> 1990s. I would love to reimplement lotus style menus !

> Redisplay in text, you thinking Curses/NCurses?

terminfo/ncurses


> Curses was designed to abstract the assorted video terminals of the day (now
> everything is an VT100/ANSI derivative) and to optimise the sending of minimal
> sequences of escape codes to a **serial terminal** (or terminal emulator) to
> update the screen.

yes i am aware

> There used to be BSD Curses, Solaris Curses, System V Curses, pdcurses, (and
> Mortice Kern Systems (MKS) Curses).  X/Open (now SUS) created a standard for
> Curses that brought together the minor difference into one.  NCurses (written
> in C++) was starting around the time of POSIX.2, X/Open, and Unicode standards
> and hasn't change much since and is stable.  SUS has Curses Issue 7 which
> clarifies the text.

I am very aware of this aggrevation.

> Terminal Difference algorithms are related to Edit Distance / Longest Common
> Subsequence algorithms - think `diff(1)`.  There is a paper from Bill Joy on
> Curses and some other papers related to terminal Edit Distance/LCS I obtained
> when working on MKS Curses (buried on my book shelf).

yeah, but building the matrix is not easy, especially when the person is
currently typing.


> There are books "Software Tools in PASCAL" by Kernigan & Plauger ISBN
> 0-201-103342-7 and "A Software Tools Sampler" by Web Miller ISBN 0-13-822305-X
> that cover editors.  The latter also covers terminal updating for an editor
> (Edit Distance/LCS).  See also `diff(1)` and my IOCCC 2015 `npdif(1)` also
> cover Edit Distance/LCS (I supply several References in the documentation to
> papers).


YES! New Books! Thank you!

> Frankly I think terminal updates is a well solved problem - worth learning and
> studying since the topic of Edit Distance/LCS relates to other subject areas
> like gene sequencing, but not worth a new library IMO.

I agree with you on this.

> An editor's edit engine covers the storage and its manipulation of the text.
> The terminal update display algorithm for an editor would be part of the
> UI/hardware interface and as has been mentioned else where GUI for desktop
> paradigms.

Well call the "edit engine" a "redisplay engine".
Thank you for the descent conversation and my new books that are now
being shipped by amazon, thank you for the recommendations.

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z-ed Zayd Mohammed <zaydm@172.24.208.1> - 2026-08-16 21:29 +0000
  Re: z-ed Keith Thompson <Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com> - 2026-08-16 16:20 -0700
    Re: z-ed Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson <johann@myrkraverk.invalid> - 2026-08-17 21:46 +0800
      Editor design & Buffer Gap Anthony Howe <achowe@snert.com> - 2026-10-11 09:05 -0400
        Re: Editor design & Buffer Gap ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) - 2026-10-11 13:42 +0000
        Re: Editor design & Buffer Gap Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-10-11 21:00 +0000
          Re: Editor design & Buffer Gap Anthony Howe <achowe@snert.com> - 2026-10-11 20:50 -0400
            Re: Editor design & Buffer Gap Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-10-12 06:11 +0000
              Re: Editor design & Buffer Gap Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> - 2026-10-12 11:05 +0200
        Re: Editor design & Buffer Gap steve g <Sgonedes1977@gmail.com> - 2026-10-12 17:42 -0400
          Re: Editor design & Buffer Gap Anthony Howe <achowe@snert.com> - 2026-10-18 06:03 -0400
            Re: Editor design & Buffer Gap cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) - 2026-10-18 23:26 +0000
            Re: Editor design & Buffer Gap steve g <Sgonedes1977@gmail.com> - 2026-10-19 13:08 -0400
              Re: Editor design & Buffer Gap Anthony Howe <achowe@snert.com> - 2026-10-20 14:12 -0400

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