[Ruby]: Perform variety of operations on a text document.

Question

I am a beginner. I am making a text editor wherein a user can perform variety of operations and can even convert it to a rich text.

Here are my queries:

(1) I want to provide the user a text-editing window wherein they can type-in text. How to do this? Which control and what-so-ever is involved?

(2) When the user has entered text, how to perform operations on the text. Do I need to take it in a buffer or something better? A user can select a portion of text and my program must determine that portion and perform operations on it.

Answer 1

1. You're going to need a GUI framework. Several are listed in this SO question. Don't jump straight for shoes, however: it may not have all the capabilities you need for your second question. Shoes is an excellent lightweight framework but you're probably going to need to go deeper.
2. Take a good long look at the String class, you're going to need it. You're also going to need to respond to events within the text box control of whatever framework you choose, so check that it's able to tell you about things like key-down/up, mouse-down/up/click/drag and so on.