One of the projects I’m working on at the moment is a text editor written in Java. I’ve thought about making my own editor for a long time and since a while it’s one of the things I dabble with in my spare time. There are a few good text editors written in Java out there already like Jext and JEdit, so does the world need yet another one? Well, probably not, but I like the challenge and figured it could be a fun exercise so I’m having a go at it. That’s not saying I don’t take it seriously.

So, what’s the current status? I started with the actual text editing component(the part that response to user input and outputs text in an area displayed on screen), which is the most important part of the editor. If that’s no good the whole editor will stink and no one will ever want to use it, including me. I could have chosen to use an existing component for this part but again, curiosity led me to start from scratch, hopefully it will be at least as good as existing solutions. Time will tell how (un)wise that decision was. At the moment the component works but lacks quite a few features. Currently I’ve paused almost all work on that and focus now is on the bigger picture, more on that and other details soon.