I built my own text editor to escape VS Code's DOM soup
Fine, I'll build my own text editor
Frustrated with modern editors, David Bushell experiments with building a text editor from scratch. He tries rendering on canvas, then contenteditable, and finally settles on a textarea with syntax highlighting. Along the way he discovers performance pitfalls, accessibility wins, and the surprising complexity of text editing—like why a lemon emoji is 5 characters long.
Looks like 90% of a text editor with 1% of the features.
- tzs
Sometime around 1980-81 I had a part time job while an undergraduate in college doing system programming/admin for the Caltech High Energy Physics department.
Rob Pike was the system programmer/admin before me when he was a grad student in high energy physics, but he left to go work at Bell Labs.
One day another student, Karl Heuer, and I both were engaging in the common programmer pastime of complaining about the screen editors of the day and saying we could write something better.
Somehow this turned into a competition, and we both spent all night racing against each other writing our editors. It was mostly silent except for the typing, interrupted by the occasional announcement of some feature that was now working to hopefully rattle the other.
In the morning the other student system programmer/admin, Norman Wilson, got in and saw what Karl and I had been up to.
Norman mentioned this in an email to Rob Pike. His response was something close to this:
> Everyone writes a screen editor. It's easy to do and makes them feel important. Tell them to work on something useful.
It was only a couple years or so later that Rob Pike wrote a screen editor. I wonder if it made him feel important? :-)
- akersten
Yes, who would have guessed that the <textarea> element, designed specifically for this use case and built into browsers for 3 decades, would be the most performant and behaviorally consistent way to implement editable text.
I'm kind of sad the author stopped shedding unneeded complexity there though... we're not really building a text editor yet, we're building a website with a fancy input field. If we want to build a proper text editor we must eschew the bloat that is the web browser too.
- pmkary
Text editors are like mechanical watches or fountain pens. There is just so much beauty in the machinery that makes them. For me, there are hardly any other modules that are this satisfying to watch being made. Each time I find a new one (a good one like this), with everything on ropes and rendering and I-beam placement computations and ... it feels like a Christmas gift.
- krzyzanowskim
the Web is probably the most limited platform today to build custom text editor, in terms of text layout, interaction and all the small bits that may matter. It is still lacking proper API to interact with the OS input system outside the browser built-in text capabilities. That's why the <canvas> approach is so painful, and everything else is "limited" by the HMTL and Browser implementation details.
- dang
Recent and related:
They don't make 'em like Sublime Text anymore - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49209354 - Aug 2026 (13 comments)
- nottorp
There really is a fps counter on there.
Is the experiment seriously rendering continuously in a loop?
- stillpointlab
I literally just got Fable to write me a text editor. Well, I'll be honest, I got it to wrap the KDE KTextEditor library which is like 90% of a text editor.
I had been using Kate which was what an LLM suggested was the closest to something like Sublime Text on Fedora. But even Kate, which was great, had too much going on.
So I asked Fable to take the text editor part (KTextEditor) and wrap it using Rust with an LSP server. It took about 2 days but I have a tiny, super fast little editor. I use Sway to manage things like tabs, fuzzel stands in for fuzzy file search, broot stands in for an explorer view. I've already added Markdown preview support. I might get around to some basic git integration.
Then I got it to turn that little editor into a note-taking interface that I have bound to a Mod-m key binding to keep notes in ~/Notes.
We live in wild times. I hope everyone is taking advantage while they can.
- Jean-Philipe
OT but I really like the design of this website. It's fresh, it's fun, but still easy to read. Love the AI policy page as well.