Making Minimalist Text Editor in C on Linux

Making a Minimalist Text Editor using C Library calls on Linux
You can view the code I wrote in the video over here: gist.github.com/nir9/6398b692...

[@emirbrkic6649]

We need more chanel like this : C, Linux and vim, without an intro only pure clean code

[@enderman4]

Linux (wsl2)

[@mhm6421]

​@@enderman4still is linux

[@TheLukasBer]

Check tsoding daily. Awesome channel with similar characteristics.

[@phitc4242]

I swear I'm on the verge of doing this, but I'm not thaz good as he is lmao

[@MBrieger]

Seriously, I am 58 years old and learned UNIX and C way back when. The Author needs to get some typing skills. There are more errors than actual Code.

[@alangamer50]

No Intro, no context, no nothing, he just jumped straight to the code and I love that. This was really useful and I literally just found out about the man command

[@yuyuyuyuyuy484]

No intro, only keyboard sounds and simple explanations. Love it.

[@Cromwell224]

Well hey, it's supposed to be minimalist right

[@rogerwinright2290]

Your channel is probably my new favorite programming channel. Quick to the delivery and gives good tips and tricks along the way!

[@debajyatidey9468]

Finally found a channel where I can know & learn practical applications of C. Ig this channel is a blessing for me.

[@tech477]

Thank you for not wasting our time with useless talking. Raw, basic, straight to the point - fantastic channel.

[@nyzss]

I’m learning C and these tutorials are a blessing, thank you very much for the content. If there was one thing I’d like very much is maybe longer and more in depth tutorials.

[@snowpirate2652]

This looks really cool! I tried the web server example you showed which worked really well and helped me to learn a little more about C, so I'm looking forward to giving this a try when I can. Please keep posting these great vids!

[@themannyzaur]

This is fantastic! Glad I found your channel

[@JotaDevelopment]

Everything in this channel is so good. I'm currently learning C, just because I have time enought to learn, and this kind of videos help me a lot. Cheers, Nir!

[@fuzzy-02]

I loved the commentary and showing manual while writing the code without over explaining things as if everyone watching isn't at least a basic programmer. Basics provided and the rest for us. Thank you!

[@starc0w]

Very cool channel, really great!🍀Thank you very much! Small note about the code: If you read in 1024 bytes with fread, which is exactly the size of your buffer, you run the risk of overwriting the 0-termination of buffer (as soon as the file is larger than or equal to 1024 bytes). This means UB with printf("%s", buffer).

[@nirlichtman]

Thanks :) that is a good point! when reading strings, it is a good practice to read one less than the buffer length into the zeroed buffer to avoid this issue. Remember that as I mentioned in the beginning of the vid, the code is just for fun and not for production

[@hermessantos181]

Bro, your channel is exactly what i was searching, your videos are amazing, thank you for sharing it

[@wispysparks]

Engaging, straight to the point, keep up the good work man!

[@animeshsarkar295]

I like the teaching style. Thank you Sir for providing useful contents

[@theoriginalneckbeard]

Such a great channel. Without all that cringy clickbaiting, without all those cringy thumbnails. Just great content. Keep it up!

[@john.darksoul]

You make writing code in C seem enjoyable :D

[@rafaeloledo]

this is the type of channel i wish i was watching on my first days of programming :)

[@siddharthbisht1287]

thank you, this is really cool❤❤❤

[@wojciechd2135]

Very good Video, straight to the point 👍.

[@cursedfox4942]

That’s beyond minimalist and a lot of code for something so simple

[@hakonh3252]

It is fine to ignore error handling and stuff like that for toy examples, but consider showing or at least mention the bounds checked versions of the string manipulation functions. The old ANSI versions are basically deprecated as they are too dangerous to be used in actual production code.

[@zeektm1762]

What alternative for low level I/O do you recommend?

[@Mike-gs7eo]

strncpy over strcpy for example. The n variants of these routines require a size parameter used to bound access. @@zeektm1762

[@hakonh3252]

@@zeektm1762 I didn't say anything about I/O. I'm talking about string manipulation, like strncpy, strncmp, memchr.

[@user-ed1nw6vr8n]

@@hakonh3252 so what alternative for those functions? Can you explain more

[@johnshaw6702]

​@@user-ed1nw6vr8nThe functions he is using are fine under these known circumstances. If you don't know the string source, then you should use stricter methods. Today that means functions like strcpy_s, that require specifying the maximum length of the acceptable string. Thus avoiding buffer overruns. You can easily craft your own methods of avoiding such issues, I did just that for many years. Its only necessary in cases that you are not in full control of the data you are processing or if you are creating a library, which, by definition, means you're not in control of its usage. When I first started programming, I gave my personal guarantee that my code would not crash the system, because I validated and tested everything. I, of course, didn't guarantee against hardware or memory failure, which was out of my control. Then Windows came out I couldn't guarantee anything, because my code was dependent on Windows and it's drivers, which was totally outside my control.

[@sollybrown8217]

Good video. Like the stb small libs in c one.

[@dailydoseofshtposts6891]

Bro youre so underrated, i just found about you yesterday and i was fascinated, you have superb potential!

[@foxmoss_]

these vid have been making me use the man pages more :)

[@Maagiicc]

This is gonna be the next vim 😳

[@SimGunther]

More like ed: The "official" UNIX text editor 😅

[@razvandedu5285]

Dude is coding without autocomplete... crazy!

[@ullaskunder]

I wish I hadn't give up C

[@SimGunther]

It's never too late to pick it back up :)

[@byronhambly]

Hey, just found your channel, subbed! Small suggestion: why not split the screen vertically instead of horizontally?

[@bity-bite]

he can read more stuff if it's split horizontally

[@slendi9623]

@@bity-bite disagreed

[@nirlichtman]

That's a good suggestion I actually mostly use horizontal split for some reason but I should definitely use vertical more especially for code with short lines, thanks!

[@byronhambly]

@@nirlichtman fair enough for your workflow! I agree that with shortish lines and a landscape screen, vertical split would work better for your videos. All the best and happy hacking!

[@antonw8134]

If you liked this video, you may also like the kilo text editor. Do a search and enjoy!

[@liquidmobius]

I like your style, straight to the manpages. A real pro

[@prebenskill]

Take my sub!

[@littlecurrybread]

It would be fun if you tackled one of the c projects at codecrafters like the bittorrent clone

[@arnabbanik6403]

wow nice

[@bartholomewjoyce]

Okay, add syntax highlighting and this can be my main editor

[@nirlichtman]

Hmm, interesting idea for another video :)

[@therealnotanerd]

It may look good, but your editor has no syntax highlighting. Just kidding 🙂. It was awesome. The last time I developed in c was a few decades ago and it is nice to see these "basic" videos. Maybe I will start developing in C again for fun. And your channel will be a valuable resource. Thanks.

[@miguelnto]

That's kinda how the text editor "ed" works.

[@Mike-gs7eo]

Cool vid but this is super dangerous code. Strcpy should almost never be used. What happens if you edit a file here with a line longer than 1024 bytes :)

[@juanchole1184]

Why strcopy is dangerous?

[@Mike-gs7eo]

@@juanchole1184 Strcpy does not take a length parameter and will keep copying bytes to the destination until it encounters a NULL byte in the source string. If the source is larger than the destination, then it will overflow which can lead to exploitable memory corruption

[@nirlichtman]

The code is just for fun and not for production (as the disclaimer in the beginning of the vid) so I skip many additional checks besides the strcpy case :) If I would have written this for actual production use I would handle this by adding a check for the lengths before calling strcpy to make sure it would not overflow

[@zombie_pigdragon]

@@nirlichtman It would have been nice if (maybe even in editing) you'd added a disclaimer when writing particularly dangerous code, since there's a high risk people won't know what's safe/dangerous to write and will blindly copy the (entertaining, btw) video they've seen online.

[@abiiranathan]

No nonsense coding! No fluff

[@mrx2586]

How did you split the terminal into both a text editor and a CLI within the same tab? and how are you switching between them?

[@nirlichtman]

I am using the window splitting feature of Vim which is very powerful, for more information check out my video about window splitting on my playlist "Vim Tips"

[@TheWinnieston]

Thanks so much! Time to port this to 8080 assembly and put it on my retro computers! And then I can add any feature I want! *EDIT* I already added a simple command parser so you can insert, delete, edit lines and type out the file from any line number. ED here I come!

[@TickerDev]

אין עליך אח, מטורף!

[@nirlichtman]

תודה!

[@TickerDev]

@@nirlichtman אין אני יזהה ישראלי ממרחקים 👀

[@nirlichtman]

@@TickerDev 😂

[@Tordek]

I understand this is a toy so the lack of error checking and such is fine, however one bad practice you really should cure yourself of is the preventative initialization of variables. When you ask for the line number, you do: int line = 0; scanf("%d", &line); Initializing line is unnecessary - it will be immediately overwritten - but it's a bad practice because by initializing it to "some" value you prevent the compiler from letting you know about any uninitialized accesses. It's preferrable to leave the variable uninitialized. Similarly with initializing the buffer: If I'd forgotten about null-termination, I'd much rather see data changing on every run (hinting at uninitialized access) than stuff appearing to run correctly. Also, a small detail: main _must_ return int. Returning void is an error.

[@nirlichtman]

Thanks for the feedback, those are good points 👍 About the last point, main can actually also return "void" since C99 according to the C standard (in which case the exit code of the program will be undefined): devdocs.io/c/language/main_function

[@Tordek]

@@nirlichtman Good to see some evolution in the language match usage. Nice video! Your channel looks fun.

[@jazzyBSD]

great! it's like ed

[@exvimmer]

Noice

[@AggamRahamim-fs2zm]

is this windows + WSL? terminal looks like that how'd you get a tiling wm?

[@nirlichtman]

Yes, more info on welcome link on the channel description :)

[@AggamRahamim-fs2zm]

@@nirlichtman אגב האנגלית שלך מעולה, בדכ לא שומעים ישראלים עם כזה מבטא

[@nirlichtman]

@@AggamRahamim-fs2zmתודה! אני במקור מארצות הברית :)

[@AggamRahamim-fs2zm]

אה אוקי חחח הגיוני@@nirlichtman

[@antontheyeeter]

why was main void?

[@andrewliu6592]

because that's a thing that c allows

[@yashwanth8269]

link for github repo?

[@nirlichtman]

Added to the description :)

[@ryuen-vn8em]

Hi,I occasionally figured out that you can press Caps lock + k at the name of any function in your code and the man page of this function will be opened ,Maybe it will be useful for somebody

[@cookedpotato]

With lsp extensions on nvim you can even do a hover like that of vscode. Also you can use the :Man to open a man page in split screen in vim or nvim , incase anyone wated to know too

[@BlueBerryXD]

I'm going crazy, or is this man running a windows vm that is running ubuntu? Vm inspection?

[@nirlichtman]

Windows 10 with WSL

[@BlueBerryXD]

@@nirlichtman But it looks like you are running windows terminal inside of dwm? Or is it just for the lols?

[@nirlichtman]

@@BlueBerryXD in this video I used a port of dwm for Windows called dwm-win32, since then I have stopped using dwm-win32 and started using a new twm I am working on called LightWM (due to many bugs in dwm-win32)

[@furiousmilk6559]

you sound like mark zuc

[@TecnocraciaLTDA]

lol, you just made a very basic version of ed

[@king1king2king3]

Your videos are perfect but there's one exception the code editor that you use frustrates me and doesn't encourage me to continue the video. I think everything will be fine if you use a modern code editor.

[@nirlichtman]

Thanks! Reason I use Vim is that it is my favorite code editor, coming to it after using IDEs, I decided 4 years ago to learn it properly and started really liking it and switched to using it as my main editor. Except my videos which are specific about Vim (which are mostly my early content), it should be easy to follow using other editors since the focus of these videos is about the programming.

[@jcen_]

​@@nirlichtmanVim is awesome, I switched from vscode to neovim about half a year ago and I'm never going back unless I end up working with something like java/c# which from my experience pretty much require an IDE. Other than that I've been doing some Go and C recently and neovim works great with them. And don't even get me started on the infinite customization possibilities.

[@arupde6320]

be regular .

[@ElPikacupacabra]

`void main` .... : |

[@broggl]

using vim to write a text editor lmao