Introduction
Some years ago a booklet has been published, called Build your own text editor, a guide to create a minimal text editor from scratch in the C programming language, based on the code of the kilo editor. It's a fun exercise to learn some C programming, because writing a toy text editor is fun.
In my attempt at learning the Zig programming language, I thought that rewriting that editor in Zig would have been a good exercise as well, and since learning resources for Zig aren't overly abundant, I thought it would have been a good idea to write a guide on how to do it, step by step, following the example of the booklet I mentioned before.
I want to make it clear that I'm neither an expert Zig programmer (this was my first Zig program), or an expert programmer in general (I'm self-taught and I just dabble with programming so to speak), so don't expect great technical insights or elaborate programming techniques, it's not the purpose of this document anyway. Moreover, I never claim that the way I solve a particular problem in this program is the best way to solve it, neither that it's the one that is the most idiomatic to the Zig programming language. Like its own predecessor, the C programming language, Zig is rather free-form in the sense that it doesn't enforce a particular programming style or paradigm. Still, also Zig has its idioms and best practices, and I try to follow them in general, but sometimes I will also show different ways to approach the same problem.
As a matter of fact, in this guide I don't strive to find the optimal solutions, from the point of view of performance optimizations and memory usage for example, but generally the simplest ones that I consider still acceptable. It is a minimal text editor, after all.
Also remember that the program we're creating is just a toy, an exercise to learn something more about a programming language, and not a tool that can have any serious use.
Compared to the original C version, here we will not respect the 1024 lines of
code limit (from which the name kilo stems) and we will not be limited to
a single file, since pursuing (or even worse achieving) such coinciseness
would preclude us from using many useful features of the Zig programming
language, such as importable modules and instantiable types. Having everything
in a single file might make sense for small libraries, but it's not what we're
doing here.
I do sometimes use collapsible notes:
Speaking of the knowledge required to understand this booklet, this is not a programming guide but rather an exercise, so I will expect that you have at least some notion in systems programming languages like C, in the sense that I will suppose that you know already what pointers are and how to use them, or anything that can be considered basic programming knowledge.
I will also expect that you know the basics of the Zig programming language, so if you didn't already, I suggest that you go through the exercises from the ziglings project before attempting this one. Other learning resources that I found useful are (in no particular order):
- Zig on exercism.org
- Learning Zig
- Zig Cookbook
- zig.guide (slightly outdated)
and the most important of all, always up to date: