A Brief Glance at How 5 Text Editors Manage Their Textual Data

http://ecc-comp.blogspot.com/2015/05/a-brief-glance-at-how-5-text-editors.html

by fallat • 11 years ago

4 2 11 years ago

ecc-comp.blogspot.com

acc54321• 11 years ago

Why is emacs on this list? It is an operating system, not a text editor. You might as well put Windows 8 on the list.

The MPW Shell - Macintosh Programmer's Workshop - had the ability to open and edit text files of any size, without regard to the memory installed in the machine. It did so even on system 6, before virtual memory was implemented in system 7.

While mostly used to edit source code and scripts, there were some uses to that, such as looking at big log files. MPW was used quite a lot for internal QA by apple; some of our QA tools would spew out quite verbose logs.

Strictly speaking that's not rocket science, but I've never known a text editor to do that.

I was once asked to implement a scrolling list box with ten or so items in it, but that could scroll through 3.5 GB of search hits. My implementation was inspired by the MPW shell. The iOS UITableView works much the same way.

See if you can figure it out, I'm tired.

A Brief Glance at How 5 Text Editors Manage Their Textual Data

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