The Craft of Text Editing: Emacs for the Modern World

This book is required reading for anyone who intends to write a text editor, tiny or huge, even if the editor is far outside of the Emacs culture. The full range of timeless editor topics are covered, including human-machine interface, design patterns for internal data structures, and historical development of the hard-won truths which we now hold as self-evident about editing text in a text editor or a word-processor. The history is a little biased toward a TECO-only perspective (but then again any historical discussion of any topic inevitably emphasizes the historian's own perspective). In a perfect world, this book would be a Volume One of a two volume set, with the other volume focusing on the text-editing advances made by Multics Emacs with its display optimization techniques and emphasis on Lisp as an extension language for Emacs. But alas, only this TECO-focused volume exists and is out-of-print (on paper) at that. Finseth is definitely loyal to the buffer-gap and paged buffer-gap design pattern. The buffer-gap family of design patterns are definitely superior to many of the naive approaches used by many people attempting to write an editor. ... Finseth's and Greenberg's record of the Emacs history together fills in once again what the current momentum of GNU Emacs blots out for us moderns today. What would be truly interesting is to get Finseth, Greenberg, Gosling, and Stallman together to write multiple hundreds more pages in order to expand Finseth's notable achievement discussed here to give the most complete Emacs history from the TECO heritage, the Multics heritage, and the open-source/free(dom)-software heritage. Please consider this book more of a design-patterns book for editing text than as an Emacs-only book. In fact this is one of the very few books which discusses design-patterns for editing text at all.