Literally I only praised and wrote how much I love something and how beautiful text editors are. And there are people who cannot stand this :))) oh wow!
On text editor related topics, you should have thrown down the gauntlet and been explicitly clear that emacs rules, vi sucks, spaces are supreme, tabs are terrible, and mixing them is miscegenation. That way you only offend evil people, so their downvotes are delightful. Revel in them instead of whining!
Since you enjoy beautiful machinery, here are some classic clockworks:
There is just an insane amount of engineering and work you have to do. Measuring text and shaping fonts is a nightmare, computing chart atlases, having infinite scroll with virtual lines coming to and out of the screen, all the strange data structures to preserve optimized decoration rendering, ropes and ropes (hard data structures), navigating with the keyboard, computing which character interaction is closer to the I-beam when jumping up and down, also caching your previous movements to go back where you actually were. CRDT and atomic editing strategies... There are hundreds and thousands of articles and papers and stuff covering these things. It’s just something we take for granted with so much beauty in the background.
I think you are over estimating it. Sure unicode support is a hell hole. But if you stick to ascii, it is not very hard, that is including syntax highlighting. virtual lines ....I don't know about CRDT or atomic editing though...
