Greg and John,
Thanks for the feedback. I was just thinking about all the effort I put
into trying to write a text editor in Java quite a few years back. Of
course it may be easier now. I didn't want to reinvent the wheel but found
it hard to choose the best starting point. There are so many relevant Java
classes to become familiar with as well as free Java-based software
libraries.
One thing I particularly remember was spending quite a bit of time trying to
understand how a gap buffer works. I believe that is still considered one
of the most efficient data structures for supporting text insertion and
deletion.
This project does sound worthwhile but my guess is that it could take
multiple person-years of effort. Best wishes!
SusanJ
For a description of the software, to download it and links to
project pages go to http://liblouis.org
