Writing my own text editor, and daily-driving it

A developer spent 2 years building their own TUI text editor in Rust after being dissatisfied with existing options like Helix, Neovim, and Emacs. Key engineering challenges covered include cursor manipulation, a fuzzy file browser with simple but effective ranking heuristics, a custom regex engine with multiple performance optimizations (threaded code VM, CPS form, vtable-free dispatch), demand-driven incremental syntax highlighting, multi-threaded project-wide search with work-stealing, and an integrated terminal emulator using the alacritty_terminal crate. The author advocates for building personal tools as a way to learn deeply, improve productivity, and rediscover joy in programming.