"between `what i want` and `what i want to want`"
would be a fitting working title for something i've
been thinking of exploring in a couple of
paragraphs of written rumination. but between me and
`what i want to want` i seem to be spending a lot of
time thinking about, researching and working on
creating the very text editor i want to write said
ponderings with during the last week or so. 

i haven't had something that repeatedly causes me to
forget about the time and lose sleep like this
several years. not counting work projects, whether
self-imposed or not.

it's just a reignited love affair with computers and
a dowry consisting of a combinatorial explosion of
things to map out, design, plan and work on
incrementally.

i built the fundamentals by following the excellent
guide on viewsourcecode.org called "Build Your Own
Text Editor", but using another programming
language (odin) and its standard library and trying
to adhere to its conventions.

my implementation of the editor is built as a shared
library and i bootstrap it with a separate
executable that will automatically hot reload .so
whenever i recompile it copying the old state into
the new build, if possible. the idea is to then
extend the program with guile by exposing the
procedures needed to perform most
editing/io/input/search/drawing/...  actions to its
API, but to get there i would at least need to
implement action queues (instead of doing a
`switch`-loop over keyboard input, so i can do most
actions programatically and create an undo/redo
stack?) and handling and drawing of multiple buffers
and fork/exec of external processes with messaging
between the parent process and its child.

(i'll spare any readers the punchline of the dry joke
that hovers above this entry[1].)

i have spent a ridiculous amount of time in my life
in front of computers and more time than most of my
peers "computing" as a means to an end in itself.
our collective oblivion regarding how, in a sense,
computers seem to hijack our very experience while
affording us to perform various activities within
the virtual workspaces and storage rooms and
"information highways", have left me with a need to
at least gather whatever understanding i can of what
a computer does *materially*, and by extension try
to "shape" the experience according to what feels
good to me. for people like me it's not what you do
with the toy/tool/appliance/machine/instrument in a
productive sense that matters, it's how it feels
doing it? and as far as i know computing lacks a
term that corresponds to what "game feel" conveys
about the human-machine-interaction of computer
games. 

i think what brings me so much inspiration ("geist")
taking this detour away from "writing my novel"[2]
is in it's combination of both me developing insight
into what "computing" really means when it
designates bespoke manipulation of text and
exploring the field of potential
"human-machine-interaction"-feel in doing it.

  [1]: "only then will i be able to write about the
       gap between `what i want` and `what i want to 
       want`", if you didn't anticipate it.

  [2]: this is the probably the only really good 
       running joke Family Guy pulled off