Build Your Own Text Editor

Welcome!  This is an instruction booklet that shows you how to build a text editor in C.

The text editor is antirez’s kilo, with some changes.  It’s about 1000 lines of C in a single file with no dependencies, and it implements all the basic features you expect in a minimal editor, as well as syntax highlighting and a search feature. 

This booklet walks you through building the editor in 184 steps.  Each step, you’ll add, change, or remove a few lines of code.  Most steps, you’ll be able to observe the changes you made by compiling and running the program immediately afterwards. 

I explain each step along the way, sometimes in a lot of detail.  Feel free to skim or skip the prose, as the main point of this is that you are going to build a text editor from scratch!  Anything you learn along the way is bonus, and there’s plenty to learn just from typing in the changes to the code and observing the results. 

See the appendices for more information on the tutorial itself (including what to do if you get stuck, and where to get help). 

If you’re ready to begin, then go to chapter 1! 

Table of Contents



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