It's an amazing fun thing to do, but I probaby wouldn't wan't to do it again now. This thing didn't handle unicode (I had never heard of it), barely handled spell checking and didn't handle bi-directional input.

Text (1 byte per char) was stored in a big array on the heap. Styles were also an array (again on the heap) of fixed length structs. Font information, in the form of fixed-point width tables, was gathered from system calls and cached.

It did actually support inline pictures though, which was pretty challenging.

Writing an editor is a hugely fun project. Highly recommended.

[1] https://atpm.com/3.03/page11.shtml

This is very much like that, but turned up to 11. Very slick presentation and a nice, simple website as well. Nice work!

p.s I realize that there are a ton of hard-to-read digital fonts available as well, but I grew up in the pre-"desktop publishing" times for better or worse

The company’s customer-facing website was servlet based. The main servlet was performing horribly, time outs, spinners, errors etc. Our team looked at the code and found that the original team implementing the logic had a problem they couldn’t figure out how to solve, so they decided to apply the big hammer: they synchronized the doService() method… oh dear…

At 59, I applied for a “full stack” (ugh..not my favorite term) job at a large Asia-based multi-national corporation working on support software (web apps) for their entertainment appliance platform. I got the job after a blessedly short interview process that did not involve any leet coding problems.

I am on an amazing senior team at a company with a great, relaxed work culture! This work is many things: fun, challenging, predictable, boring. Devs will understand how it can be all these things at once lol.

Find yourself a situation that meets your current drive/ambitions. There are a ton of places out there. Probably harder now (I got the job in 2018), but there are still people hiring.

Love this, perfectly said. Or, in the words of Don Martin, Thook Zak Splak KWOP!

I was an avid reader as a child in the late 60s to early 70s. I eventually moved on to National Lampoon as a teen, but Mad will always glow in my childhood memory heart.

I still have a decent-sized collection of Mad paperbacks. Many (most, all?) were written by a single Mad artist/writer. My favorites of these were ones written by Don Martin and Al Jaffee.

The problem is that building generalized, actually-in-the-real-world reusable UI components is really, really hard! Generalizing other people's use cases is very tricky without walking in their shoes.

Usually what happens is that a glorious, well-intentioned group within the company puts together a few very short-sighted, yet kind-of-good-looking components for a very specific use case and management sees it and says: "hey, why can't we use this in other projects?" The answer, of course, is that they weren't meant for that! They don't handle about 100 different things that would allow for expanded use in the company. One would need a dedicated team to make it so, which management really doesn't want to pay for.

Trust me, it only gets worse from there...

My advice is to build domain-specific LOB components for your business area and use a real 3rd-party solution for the underlying GUI lib. This actually has a chance of working out. Even doing this is way harder than it sounds lol.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41408173

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Wind up the machine, melt the metal in a small crucible, drop the pin and duck (lol). I was once sprayed by a small stream of molten brass at +/- 1700 degrees (poor mold with thin wall, later fixed and recast) and still have a scar 40 years later to prove it.

The most amazing part were the solos. Sun Ra would point to each player in turn and each would stand and deliver the most blistering solo for about 5 minutes each, barely taking a breath. Then Sun Ra would motion to the next and this would continue until everyone had a turn.

The music was incredibly spacey and so good. "Space is the place"!

I can see if you need to edit multi-gig log files and things will not fit in memory, but for small files, array is totally fine.

There were other tricks that were done back then to keep the number of single char inserts down to a minimum while typing. Like reading chars into a small buffer during fast typing and then inserting all the keystrokes at once as soon as you had the time.