I'm surprised that they didn't find some scientific/artistic optimum for that, like they did with the Acme colors (which are picked by someone vastly superior to normal users who would just screw things up, if I remember correctly).
After careful mathematical analysis, which this comment box is too small to contain, I've determined that the optimal number of spaces for a tab is precisely 2e. Unfortunately, this turns out to pose certain practical problems. I imagine Plan9 came to the same conclusion and realized there wasn't a usable mathematical justification.
That still doesn't rule out evaluation by a proper artist. We just have to wait until s/he gets out of the Tufte Ashram(tm), bearing the answer on two golden ratio tablets, lettered in Helvetica.
Never used plan9 in my life. The reason why I wrote this editor is because I don't like bloated emacs and I use this many of its features. Go produces nice 100% statically linked binaries, so eventually I can just wget the godit to any of my linux machines and just use it.
The editor is never meant to be used by anyone except me. But if someone finds it nice, I don't mind sharing it. Plus it's the only serious example of termbox library usage (I wrote it too).
I was semi-joking in reference to the comment, the Plan9 and suckless communities are famous for being very hard-headed about programming being the only way to customize their software. For example, I use dwm - http://dwm.suckless.org/ and like it a lot, though I wish they would change this aspect. I am not criticizing what you did in any way, in fact it looks very nice in comparison to great many similar projects, nice code and interesting design.
Did you read that? It does not support your notion that the plan9 community thinks programming is the way to customize software. It shows that the plan9 community thinks you shouldn't do those things, at all. They are not missing because you should edit the code to change them, they are missing because they should never exist.
Hi! I think I got (I'm not a Go programmer, reading Go is slow and not very reliable for me) that buffers are represented as linked lists of lines.
If this is true, do you still find the performance satisfactory when editing large-ish files (tens of thousands of lines)?
It used to be that buffer representation for general-purpose editing was kind of a Real Problem, so it's interesting if a basic linked list of strings representing lines cuts it, these days.
Godit is quite fast. I tested the godit on intel atom netbook, it keeps CPU usage fairly low.
In my opinion linked list of lines is perfect here. Because the only time you need to go through it in a linear fashion is the actual "goto line" operation. The rest is mostly O(1). Of course line insertion is much more common than "goto line" in editors.
The only problem in godit is that it still doesn't handle long lines very well, here most of the operations are O(N). In fact in godit every time you move a cursor or basically do anything it will do O(N) operation on a current line. I checked this kind of stuff on long enough line (10k), no problems here. I don't think there are that many docs with lines longer than 10k.
So, yes, it will work on very large files without any problems. I've just tested it by creating a 56M file with ~660k lines. Can't see any performance issues on my i5-3470, except for loading and saving, it feels like 0.5s for both or so.
Of course contiguous buffer is not an efficient way to do an editor, I guess "advanced" editors use rope data structure or something. Although most of the editors load large files slower than godit. In a perfect world on files bigger than say 50M you should do memory mapping or something. But most editors like to know the amount of lines in a file they're showing to you, so, no mmap here.
Writing software is always a good idea, at least for the experience, so don't be offended by the following comment.
In the case of this particular itch, there are many small statically linked editors, some of them quite powerful. I don't think a small emacs was ever spotted, but the original vi (not vim) is often statically linked and present in /bin in Linux installs (it's a rescue thing).
Micromacs was favorite in the late 80s. JOVE early 90s. And the commercial unipress emacs. GNU emacs outlived them, probably because situations where a light spot editor was desired are now fast enough that there is very little additional cost to a full featured editor.
That being said, I still have EDITOR set to /usr/bin/emacsclient.
Obviously the tab character should move forward to the next column divisible by the tab size -- it's not just a replacement for a fixed number of spaces!
That's just my english. Of course I meant that the tab size is the same as the size of 8 space characters. And it sounds like the tab _character_ is an equivalent to 8 spaces, which is not true. Sorry for confusing description.
Now, some people will claim that having 8-character indentations makes
the code move too far to the right, and makes it hard to read on a
80-character terminal screen. The answer to that is that if you need
more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix
your program.
I do agree that there comes a point where you can get over zealous with indentation, but 3 levels deep is pretty common. In fact you idle at one level of indentation just with having your code inside a function. So basically all you need is one conditional inside a loop and you're already maxed out.
