Inside a Text Editor Ever since my college days, after dabbling with vi and a few other editors, I always had an yearning to create my own. Now, I am still stuck with XEmacs and jEdit and had a chance to compile / study the sources and documentation of EMACS and a free editor component called Scintilla. Until now, I was under the the belief that text editors used a doubly linked list to represent the text in memory. The advantages of this approach being insertions and deletions are much more easier which is just a matter of just un-linking a node off the list. But the shortcomming is that they tend to fragment memory with each node or line take a bit of memory. The other alternative approach is to have a dynamic array which is a contiguous space of memory and can sometimes be directly written off to a file. The disadvantages are that insertion and deletion are costly and you need to reallocate quite frequently. While goint throug the source and documentation of text editors, I chanced ...
If you've read the Harry Potter series of books, you would probably know what a Pensieve is... To the rest, a Pensieve is a magical device that can store one's thoughts, categorize and interlink facts for later retrieval. This blog contains my thoughts, mostly to archive what I’ve learnt, to look back later. With my being in a technical industry, expect thoughts to be inclined towards my area of work.