{
  "id": 5016053,
  "title": "Fine, I'll build my own text editor",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/01/fine-ill-build-my-own-text-editor-5016053",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-09-01T17:12:15.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Hacker News",
    "slug": "hacker-news",
    "url": "https://dbushell.com/2026/09/01/text-editor/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "The headline of the story is \"Fine, I'll build my own text editor\". This article discusses the author's decision to create their own text editor after being frustrated with existing software like Sublime Text. They mention that VS Code's Monaco Editor is complex and slow on their Mac. The author starts their experiment by rendering everything on a canvas element, but quickly realizes the lack of interactivity is a major issue for a text editor. They implement a set of minimum viable features and find that a canvas gives them little free functionality beyond rendering. To address this, the author decides to use native browser overflow on a hidden div element, matching the canvas text and using the scroll position to calculate render offsets. While this seems promising, they acknowledge the accessibility issues of canvas and the desire to improve the editor. Ultimately, they decide to switch to using a contenteditable div element, which provides native text selection, undo history, and other accessibility features for free. They note that while this has improved the editor's functionality, there are still performance issues with longer text. The author briefly considers using a textarea element, which turns out to be more performant, but adds a third layer of div soup for visible lines to apply syntax highlighting. They also mention the OpaqueRange API and EditContext API, which could improve syntax highlighting on textarea elements. In the end, the author has created a 90% text editor with only 1% of the features, and is eager to continue developing it further.",
  "summary": null,
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 2,
    "also_reported_by": [
      {
        "outlet": "Lobsters",
        "title": "Fine, I’ll build my own text editor",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/01/fine-ill-build-my-own-text-editor",
        "published": "2026-09-01T11:18:22.000Z"
      }
    ]
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}