hecto: Change Log

hecto, Change Log

Status

I am currently rewriting hecto. Find the progress of the rewrite below. While the rewrite is in progress, you can still enjoy the 2019 version.
At this point, all chapters have been written and published. However, they still need some polishing and proofreading. The following table shows you which chapters have been published 🌐, and which ones are completely done ✅ .

2024 Version Change Log

The tutorial overall

Moved to new blogging platform and therefore a new design.
Fixed weird formatting issues with arbitrary newlines, broken links or bullet lists in the middle of nowhere.
Added snazzy new screenshots.
Switched from showing the diff and asking the reader to implement the change to showing the challenge and asking the reader to implement it.
Ended each chapter with a wrap up that summarises the learnings and efforts so far.
Changed the wording and phrasing in many places to move closer to the tone of the original tutorial, to honour the original work that went into it.
Introduced this change log.
Removed quick links and added the table of contents to the top of every page.

Introduction

Finally attributed Paige Ruten, the author of the original C tutorial, by name.
Moved the license, attribution and some prose to the appendix.
Made it clearer who this tutorial is for and what to expect, and cut down on the prose here.
Linked pound by Kofi Otuo, which is the same idea, but newer than my 2019 edition, and less verbose.

Chapter 1: Setup

Removed some setup information. No need to repeat what’s written already on the Rust page.
Started with compiling “by hand” before we move over to using cargo.
Explained the files cargo produces.
Moved the explanation on how to build production releases from later chapters to this one.
Expanded a lot on build targets and build artefacts
Corrected some instances where in the past I claimed Rust would be doing certain things when it was Cargo doing the work. Credit where credit is due.
Introduced the Rust Playground as supporting material.

Chapter 2: Entering Raw Mode

Renamed this chapter from „Reading User Input“ to the same name of the original tutorial, since it now contains more details about raw mode than before.
Took over more in depth information about escape sequences from the original tutorial.
Investigated Raw Mode in more detail.
Expanded upon dependency management with cargo, linked the documentation about feature flags.
Expanded on what the Cargo.lock is for.
Explained Results more thoroughly, to build a useful metaphor for understanding.
Removed bitwise operations from the code and only mentioned it. If you need to do bitwise operations, you’re in too deep, and likely not a Rust beginner.

Chapter 3: Raw Input and Output

In the original I wrongly claimed Clippy was a Windows 95 feature, when in reality it was an Office 97 feature. Sorry.
Brought over more under the hood terminal magic explanations from the original.
Extended opinions about idiomatic code, clean code, code smells and refactorings.
Extended explanations around types, both in general and in Rust.
Explained pointers in more detail.
Greatly expanded the explanations around traits.
Extended explanations around overflow and type casting
Added my own views on documentation.
Explained how to document things in Rust.
Made the distinction between a Cursor, a Point and a Pointer clearer.
Added an explanation around the Esc sequence

Chapter 4

Restructured the approach to make it work / make it right / make it fast iteratively.
Explained str and String in more detail
Explained Unicode, UTF-8 and encodings in more detail
Added explanations around Memory Management
Expanded the explanations for Options vs Results
Added explanations about how Iterators work
Added a section about what call stacks are, what stack traces are and how panic! works
Expanded heavily upon Grapheme Clusters
Added a section about wide graphemes/characters
Moved the introduction of UI elements besides text out of this chapter, given how packed it is with concepts and other learnings.

Chapter 5

Build-up of UI components moved here from Chapter 4.
Expanded upon the explanations around borrow checkers.
Added explanations around blanket implementations.
Added explanations about text ropes.

Chapter 6

Moved colouring of strings from Chapter 7 to here
Expanded on the history of terminal colors
Added a section about RGB and CMYK.
Added a section about Preludes.

Chapter 7:

Moved filetype detection up.
Explained parsing of certain types in more detail.
Explained Box and dyn in more detail.

Appendices

Rewrote the section about diffs to be GitHub specific.
Expanded the section on how to act when stuck and how to reach me.
Added more ideas on how to extend hecto.
Described how to contribute to hecto.
Ported and adapted text on how to use git throughout the tutorial from the original.
Described my changes to the original tutorial in more detail, to better comply with the license of Paige’s work.
Moved credits, musings around the name, motivation and other prose here.
Explained the name hecto for those who don’t see the connection to kilo.
Added acknowledgements which also mention contributors to the 2019 version of hecto.

hecto

Now works on Windows (untested, though).
Disables raw mode even on most crashes instead of leaving the user with a broken terminal.
Now supports wide characters properly.
Now supports zero width characters.
Is now able to support unicode file names.
Searching now wraps around to the top or bottom when navigating through the results.
Searching now centers the search result.
Better highlighting of search results.
searching now works properly with graphemes and wide characters.
Now recognises Rust files regardless of the case the file name is in.
Improved highlighting of numeric literals
Improved highlighting of lifetime specifiers
Now supports multi line strings
Now supports nested multi line comments

2019 Version

Initial version.

This post is part of the tutorial hecto: Build Your Own Text Editor in Rust. Find more information, especially around licensing and credits, here.

Last Update: 2025-05-05T18:18:20

philippflenker.com was last updated .

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