I've gone through the features of those editors we have mentioned in this thread, and compiled a list of most of those features. Separated them into "basic infrastructure" "basic editing", "advanced editing", and "code editing". It's a long list, even if you leave out advanced and code editing. On the other hand, a lot would just be options to common functions, or is already covered by the full screen handling library.
So now to come up with a design for the generic editing library that can cater for most of that. And leaves scope for more advanced stuff to be bolted on. One thing I'm wondering about. A lot of these editors where written for the days of really slow serial connections. I see three use cases for this - direct console / xterm access (including on your smart phone), ssh over the Internet or local network, and high speed serial connection to an embedded computer on your desk (or emulator). I don't know if serial over modem access would be common. So there's a fair amount of "cater to really slow connections" stuff which I don't think we need. Also a fair bit of "cater for dumb terminal" which the basic "anything modern can understand ANSI escapes" design principle leaves out. Not worrying about these things means we don't complicate the code with lots of optimizations for how much we output, or using fancy ANSI escapes for scrolling existing text and such. I think we can get away with that. -- A big old stinking pile of genius that no one wants coz there are too many silver coated monkeys in the world.
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