[snissn]

Could you share what data structure you use to keep the text in? I'm curious how text editors work, since you need fast inserts anywhere, is the text a linked list?

[thedirt0115]

My Lua isn't strong, but I think this is what you're looking for:

Data structure initialization: https://github.com/rxi/lite/blob/master/data/core/doc/init.l...

How insertion works here, which illuminates how the table is used: https://github.com/rxi/lite/blob/143f8867a13a35f5688ad7c9771...

[dtf]

Looks like an array of lines, which is a completely reasonable structure to use.

There's a good post on the Visual Studio Code blog about why and when they moved on from an array of lines to a new structure based on a piece table.

https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2018/03/23/text-buffer-r...

[aspaceman]

And if you want to take that a step further down the rabbit hole, here's how Lua allocates the table in memory: https://stackoverflow.com/a/29930168

It's two dynamic arrays, of hashes and values, whose sizes grow as powers of two.

[pkaye]

Check out this paper. It talks about the different ways to manage the data structures for text editors.

https://www.cs.unm.edu/~crowley/papers/sds.pdf

[moonchild]

Look at ropes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_(data_structure)