I want to make my own source code editor, what are the good choices to make ?

Question

I've had it of those dozens of editors which never provides simple things like:

• distinguish type keywords and instruction keywords so I can put different colors on them.
• being cross platform using a standard GUI lib like qt gtk etc (notepad++, yes, I almost hate you).
• enough keyboard shortcut like duplicate line, comment selection, and a decent find-replace.
• Decent task-easing features like single-click-on-the-number-line-margin to select the entire line.
• Scintilla or another good-enough lexer that highlights enough different things, because brain-compiling code is one thing, quickly identify with the eyes what is what is something I find important.

I just want to support very basic languages like C, C++, maybe Python, not HTML or CSS.

Is Scintilla a good choice to just highlight those languages, and is a lexer really necessary ?

Isn't QT enough to program a text editor such as the one I want to do ? I know there is QScintilla, but is there a reason I shouldn't use a lib that integrates a lexer ? Why is Scintilla such a good lib ?

Is QT a good choice for such an editor ? (I also want to hard embed ProFont in the editor to kill any reluctant font problem between OSes).

EDIT: In short, I want to make an editor, only with the same syntax highlight features of notepad++. That's my main goal, and the use of QScintilla might be a little harder than I thought...

Answer 1

If you really want to do this (and it sounds like a lot of work) I would look at ANTLR for parsing the code. You may get some ideas from their ANTLRWorks display. To link the parse tree to a display could be a fair amount of work so I'd see what an IDE platform such as Eclipse has to offer

Answer 2

C++ is not a "very basic language" by any stretch of the imagination.

Why do you really want to do this? There are SOOO many open source code editors out there.

Answer 3

If you must write your own editor, I suggest looking at the other open source editors and examine which pieces you port to your editor.

Porting pieces of existing working and tested code is usually much better than writing your own code and debugging it.

After perusing a couple serious open source editors: Emacs, Eclips, CodeBlocks, CodeLight, etc., I believe you will start changing your mind about writing an editor from scratch.

-- Thomas Matthews
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