Any suggestion on what the easiest, platform-independent + portable (so either #forth or a vm like #uxn) system exists that can get me writing software that works in a console/terminal within minutes? I just want to focus on the practical details of building a text-editor without fighting with compiling suites and operating systems and neither do I want to deal with "cute" arbitrary limitations (uxn, pico8 etc) that don't want to deal with real-world use cases (I have markdown files several hundred K in size I need to edit)
Like, all I've ever wanted to do is solve the design issues of shit software, but because software is so shit, I've had to keep reinventing the wheel as I peel back each layer, trying to find the point where software stops being shit and all I've discovered is that it's shit all the way down and I'm reduced to banging stones together to produce sparks as some form of yak shaving my way to a text-editor
I first wrote my own text editor around 2001 using Visual Basic 6 and I used that editor, on Windows, *until VSCode was released in 2016* because #VSCode was the first non-crap Windows editor, and that might seem like a weird thing to say nowadays but in the Before Times, the best text editors in the world were on #Mac because that was the only market where developers cared about software quality and people would actually pay money for it, at all.
Windows was known for piracy and open-source software was basically unusable on the platform. We really, really have come a long way. Remember Atom? They asked the question "what if we wrote a text-editor in JavaScript?" (even worse, coffescript) and the answer was, unsurprisingly, a text-editor slower and less responsive than a teletype. VSCode was literally the first text editor on Windows to successfully copy TextMate.
But even now, one reason I stuck to my editor for so long was because it's the only editor, before or since, where the list of folders and list of files are separate which prevents things jumping around like crazy all the time and it's a feature I still lament the loss of.
@Kroc I am not sure it is a simple problem. You need something portable to handle text terminals or graphics, and that is ncurses et al or SDL et al. Can ncurses or SDL be programmed to using, say, Forth? Not even WASM has any real-world interfaces.
"The craft of text editing" by Craig Finseth is said to cover most of the aspects beyond incidentals like UI primitives.
There is the editor e3 written in x86 assrmbler, for an opposite take on simplicity compared to portability.
