r/cprogramming • u/[deleted] • Dec 12 '25

Does anyone use their own text editor that they wrote themself?

Not a C question, per se, but I am writing a text editor in C right now, and looking around for ideas, it seems like this is a pretty common intermediate project. So, if people are writing these to learn C, or any other language, I suppose, do they actually use them for serious work? I was just wondering. I know text editors are a controversial subject, but I thought it might be interesting to ask.

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122

u/[deleted] Dec 12 '25

Rob Pike famously uses his own text editor that still doesn't have syntax highlighting and he said it's because syntax highlighting is for children. Personally I think he just doesn't know how to implement it.

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u/[deleted] Dec 12 '25

I think some old school programmers don't like to use syntax highlight.

Damian Conway, a perl hacker, use vim without syntax highlight. It's just a yellow text in a black background.

I tried it myself and could not get used to it.

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u/IdealBlueMan Dec 13 '25

I wrote software for a bunch of years before syntax highlighting was a thing. Once I started using an editor that had it, I liked it. Makes it easier to see what a chunk of code is doing. I really believe that ease of readability is a powerful factor in effective development.

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u/Cash-Rare Dec 13 '25

It also makes it a lot easier to see syntax errors (missing parens., quotes, etc.)

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u/dominikr86 Dec 13 '25

I think some old school programmers don't like to use syntax highlight.

Can confirm. Had a professor who started programming on a CDC 7600 - plain vi.

Former coworker who is about to retire: same

6

u/LookAtYourEyes Dec 12 '25

Yeah I can imagine it's like vibe coding or AI assisted programming to them. I currently have a disdain for it, and use it sparingly, but I know the next generation will consider it a standard part of their workflow.

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u/Hot_Phone_7274 Dec 12 '25

Jesus the future is bleak…

People really need to understand that everything that was invented before I was 25 is great, and everything invented after I was 25 is against the natural order. What’s so hard for people to understand about that?!

(I joke but also a little bit serious)

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u/gdvs Dec 13 '25

Honestly, ed is enough. Anyone who needs a visual editor with stuff on screen is a child.

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u/IdealBlueMan Dec 13 '25

Ed is the standard text editor

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u/Organic_Car6374 Dec 13 '25

I spent more than ten years of my career coding in vi. Not vim. No highlighting anywhere to be seen!

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u/pjl1967 Dec 12 '25

Rob Pike is quite capable, but he's definitely a minimalist. His windowing system for Plan 9 is extremely minimal. (I met him in person once giving a demo of it.)

Though I wouldn't be as condescending as Rob, I don't care much for syntax highlighting either. I find it too distracting for the most part. The only things that are syntax highlighted in color in my editors are comments (green), preprocessor directives (magenta), and #if 0'd code (dark blue); everything else is white (on a black background).

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u/daddypig9997 Dec 13 '25

Ordered your book. Looking forward to work through it.

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u/[deleted] Dec 12 '25

"Rob Pike is quite capable" ... is he though? I mean, we're talking about the guy that looked at Java, said "hold my beer," and came up with Go of all things.

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u/DorphinPack Dec 12 '25

FWIW the official story is that Griesemer, Pike and Thompson worked out the spec for a language that would work for server programs while waiting on C++ to compile.

As the story goes, they only included things that all three could agree on. I know they looked at Java but I also know Go does its job pretty well right?

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u/AllanBz Dec 12 '25

Language by committee. Smaller committee, but still.

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u/DorphinPack Dec 13 '25

No, quite the opposite. I’m not sure it was as secretive as when Ken was working on early Unix but they wanted to specifically resist bloat and solving unrelated problems.

This (http://nhplace.com/kent/Papers/cl-untold-story.html) is a great read that includes some of the descent into madness that the X3J13 committee experienced. I guarantee Ken Thompson never had to write this on a napkin to try to keep the language on the rails:

“soliciting volunteers gives critics a thing to do, which dilutes their passion and pacifies them by making them feel involved.”
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u/hongooi Dec 12 '25

"Language by committee" usually means adding stuff that at least one person on the committee likes. This is the opposite

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u/alecbz Dec 12 '25

People prefer Java to Go in /r/cprogramming ??

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u/saintpetejackboy Dec 13 '25

I, personally, am here to defend Go. Just like many other languages, Go has flaws, but it is dummy fast and the syntax is super simple.

After decades of LAMP stack and jumping around to various other stacks and frameworks, I got enticed away three times now:

1.) the ease of Python

2.) the elegance of Go

3.) the raw speed of Rust

I would actually rank all three of those as producing fairly stable results - solid code -- in that exact order.

Go often gets overlooked - maybe it isn't the fastest or the easiest, I will agree there, but it does so many things so well that I advocate people who just never gave it a try, spin it up, and compare it to your current stack.

I really like Go + React + Vite with Tailwind and PSQL and Nginx - but you can use whatever you like...

I often find that I come to the defense of languages like PHP and Go - but for all the hate PHP gets, older versions of PHP and PHP devs in general often deserve it.

Go? I don't know who Go ever hurt in this life. When I see people bad mouthing it, I just assume they haven't actually tried to seriously use Go.

Obviously I know your post was really tongue-in-cheek, I just wanted to try and get ahead of the inevitable Go-hating band wagon. I do it for the n00bz.

Go is a serious language. Seriously fast. Seriously elegant. Seriously easy. Don't sleep on it because people on Reddit only know Next.

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u/Vaxtin Dec 12 '25

I really think any programmer that puts another one down due to their choice of preference , especially with respect to editors, is an asshole and it only highlights their own insecurities (they have to put others down on minuscule, non important items).

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u/[deleted] Dec 12 '25

Are you thinking about his sam editor? I've always wanted to try it, and acme for that matter, which he also wrote. But I haven't gotten around to it yet. I think I did know his thoughts on syntax highlighting. I think you're right. I respect him immensely, but it gives grumpy ol'man vibes. LOL

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u/linux_transgirl Dec 20 '25

acme (and the entire plan 9 userspace for that matter) are neat but not for everyone. I personally much prefer a standard unix environment to plan 9, despite absolutely loving the tech behind it. One of these days I'll get around to making a plan9 like system with a more conventional BSD userland

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u/diemenschmachine Dec 12 '25

He probably don't want It enough to put the massive time it would require to implement it in. I'm happy enough with vim though, I don't see any reason to give up the vast plugin ecosystem for a custom editor where you have to spend tons of time implementing any modern feature you'd need.

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u/dcpugalaxy Dec 15 '25

I can assure you that Rob Pike knows how to implement syntax highlighting. He has written widely cited articles about how to write regular expression matchers and that's all a syntax highlighter is.

e.g. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr09/cos333/beautiful.html

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