Coding A Text Editor In Less Than 1000 Lines Of C Programming Language

Short Bytes: A coder has created a text editor in C programming language in less than 1000 lines. He has shared the code on GitHub and allowed the interested programmers to take a look at it and learn.

I love small programs. With their tiny footprint, they are able to perform some useful functions. Recently, it was revealed that one such cool tiny program named Nano editor is no longer under the GNU project umbrella.

The Nano editor was a part of a terminal-based Email Client and acted the first code editor for many people. Inspired by his memories, a developer decided to code his own text editor.

You might be thinking that why someone would write a small text editor when people are busy making complex and cool stuff. Well, sometimes little things have a lot to say.

Named Kilo, smaller than Nano, this text editor was developed by Salvatore Sanfilippo. He coded Kilo is less than 1000 lines of code. For those who are interested, here’s a link to the screencast.

If you just want to get your hands dirty and grab the code, here’s the GitHub link.

Note that Kilo doesn’t depend on some library or curses. It makes use of standard VT100 escape sequences.

Currently, in alpha stage, Sanfilippo wrote the editor in just a few hours, using code from his other two projects. To know more about the development process of Kilo, feel free to visit his blog.

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Also Read: How To Code Your Own ‘Watson’ AI Bot In 50 Lines Of Code?