[HN Gopher] I wrote the world's worst text editor (2020)
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I wrote the world's worst text editor (2020)
Author : AlexeyBrin
Score : 28 points
Date : 2021-04-04 12:01 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (briancallahan.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (briancallahan.net)
| kazinator wrote:
| I made an awful line editor in the 1990's, entirely in Bash. It
| used Bash arrays to buffer the text.
|
| There is a surviving piece of it: a line editing routine. For
| many years, that was included in GNU Bash as one of the examples:
|
| https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/tree/examples/scr...
|
| They had the good sense to remove that.
| LandR wrote:
| I remember intentionally writing an awful text editor.
|
| A guy had a kid who had severe learning difficulties and motor
| problems. However he loved typing into the computer but would get
| frustrated if he hit say alt and would go to the menu, or held a
| key down too long and get duplicates. Stuff like that. Or would
| accidentally close it etc.
|
| So i wrote the worlds worst text editor, it would intercept all
| key presses so that nothing would be handled that would result in
| the cursor leaving the editor. You could hold down keys as long
| as you want and would only get one character, same with delete.
| It also made a type wtiter type noise on every key press. Pretty
| sure i had timing as well so if you pushed the same key twice
| quickly you would only get one character output.
|
| It had no menu bar and opened full screen and would start up
| wherever you left it text wise.
|
| Testing it would drive me mental. It was so frustrating to use! I
| can't even remember how you exited it as im pretty sure i was
| intercepting ctrl alt delete. This was windows xp days.
|
| The kid liked it though!
| Impossible wrote:
| This is a great lesson in accessibility and building the right
| product for a specific user. While you call it "awful" you
| ended up with something extremely accessible that made your
| user happy. This is an extreme example, but there is a lot to
| learn from this
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Intercepting ctrl alt delete is supposed to be impossible,
| though.
| LandR wrote:
| At that time i was working with kernel hooks a lot. Maybe i
| used that. I remember even having code to hide stuff from
| appearing in task manager, or hide files from showing up in
| file explorer.
|
| I remember debugging this stuff was painful, when it didn't
| work you got the BSOD.
|
| Be interested to know how much of these techniques could work
| on win 7/10. Im guessing not at all.
| sedatk wrote:
| Did the kid accidentally press Ctrl+Alt+Del together so
| many times that it was an issue to be addressed with a
| custom kernel driver? It sounds a bit like an overkill. The
| key combination was intentionally picked to avoid
| accidental presses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control-
| Alt-Delete#History
| alpaca128 wrote:
| It doesn't necessarily need to be intercepted. I remember on
| Windows 7 I managed to create a small program which opened a
| screen-filling window with the close button disabled and the
| "always on top" property. I could press Ctrl+Alt+Del as much
| as I wanted, the task manager always opened behind my
| program's window and so was pretty useless. Then again
| Windows 7 still had some quirks here and there, maybe it's
| different now.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Ctrl+Alt+Del doesn't open Task Manager directly, it opens a
| separate full-screen menu that looks like the login screen
| with options for shutting down, logging out, or opening
| Task Manager. It's been this way at least since Windows 7,
| but probably earlier.
| barrkel wrote:
| Ctrl-Alt-Del, from the old NT days, was a Secure Attention
| Sequence, theoretically not interceptable short of a kernel
| driver, and took you to a separate desktop. NT supported
| separate desktops, but they're not like virtual monitors
| you see today; they're more like separate virtual ttys in
| the Linux console sense, entirely separate desktops with
| wholly detached window environments running on them. That's
| where the lock screen lived, and where Ctrl-Alt-Del took
| you to.
|
| Windows 7 probably changed that somewhat. I know the lock
| screen in Windows 10 is super buggy wrt customisation.
| maccard wrote:
| Stackoverflow to the rescue -
| https://stackoverflow.com/a/2435686/723918
|
| You don't need to actually stop ctrl alt del, you just need
| to stop it from opening task manager!
| wolfgang42 wrote:
| You'd think, but I know of one POS system (in both senses of
| the term) that managed to do it _accidentally._ If you
| scanned a UPC into the quantity field it would lock up the
| entire OS, to the point that even Ctrl+Alt+Del was ignored
| and you had to hard-reboot the system. After years of this
| they finally gave us a patch that still froze the computer,
| but C+A+D would at least interrupt it. I never did work out
| how they managed to bungle things that badly.
| nxpnsv wrote:
| I wrote one in gwbasic for my dads 286 when i was a kid. Fixed
| number of lines, no saving-just print to paper instead, once you
| pressed enter a line couldn't change again. Dad actually used it
| to write some letters. At as this was the worst editor i ever
| made, and i loved it.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| In the 90s I wrote a simple editor with a UI for a project. I had
| no idea how hard it was to this in a performant way. Cost me a
| few weeks of sleep but learned a lot.
| kabdib wrote:
| So, what does TECO do when you type your name into it? :-)
|
| (I still use /bin/ed instead of . . . certain other editors I
| will not name here. Mercifully, all of my TECO "skills" have
| fled).
| hazeii wrote:
| As the new kid on the block, I skipped TECO for KED (which I
| have a soft spot for to this day). Sometime around '85, had to
| write a VT100 emulator for some newfangled Z80 box just so it
| could be used it as a terminal for my personal PDP-11.
| gumby wrote:
| This frankly isn't too far off what text editing was like in the
| 60s and 70s. TECO and ed evolved into visual editors but
| initially were pretty much like this, including specific commands
| to print out the neighborhood of the insertion point (or other
| span). Otherwise you edited blind.
| sedatk wrote:
| EDLIN was the only built-in text editor in MS-DOS until
| EDIT.COM appeared in 5.0. It was also based on ed.
| dukoid wrote:
| (this is not about VI)
| Demerara wrote:
| I hurried thought to be a confession of the creator of the VI
| bourgoin wrote:
| If it doesn't create a new attack surface by rendering HTML
| unprompted, it can't be that bad.
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