Top all-time · #735
Paige Ruten
Personal blog · viewsourcecode.orgprogrammingculture
Paige Ruten's personal blog at viewsourcecode.org covers programming and culture. Since 2009, 88 different Hacker News readers have linked it 120 times, most often “Build Your Own Text Editor (2017)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Often recommended · 17 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Paige Ruten's site mainly for its Kilo tutorial, which builds a terminal text editor in C step by step, and for its archive of _why's writing and code.
- Recommended for · 17 comments
- Kilo text-editor tutorial called well written, very informative, excellent and enjoyable; _why posts called best
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Build Your Own Text Editor (2017)31 people · 31 mentions · first linked 2018-03-15
- Build Your Own Text Editor8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2018-01-21
- _why's Estate7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2018-04-16
- Build Your Own Text Editor7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2017-04-05
- /snaptoken/kilo/02.enteringRawMode.html5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-09-05
- The Little Coder's Predicament4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2010-06-21
- /why/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-07-12
- The Little Coder's Predicament3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-12-19
- Snaptoken: Tutorials on writing medium-size software projects from scratch2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-07
- Io Has a Very Clean Mirror (2008)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-01-10
What Hacker News says?
Since this comment gained traction, here are some better examples of what I meant by dumbledore's office: A romp through approaches to generative adversarial networks described as if they are realms in a Tolkein world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251308 (This week's) complete guide to building a terminal text editor from scratch in C which gently holds your hand at each step: https://news.ycombinator.com/…
Comment linking /why/
on “The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News”Submitted Build Your Own Text Editor as a story · 1275 points
HN discussionI enjoyed https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/ and http://www.buildyourownlisp.com/
Comment linking /snaptoken/kilo/
on “Ask HN: “Write your own” or “Build your own” software projects”Submitted Build Your Own Text Editor as a story · 711 points
HN discussionI worked through most of this tutorial on building a simple text editor in C and greatly enjoyed it. Highly recommend it! https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/
Comment linking /snaptoken/kilo/
on “Ask HN: “Write your own” or “Build your own” software projects”Submitted Build Your Own Text Editor as a story · 323 points
HN discussionhttp://viewsourcecode.org/why/index.html
Comment linking /why/index.html
on “Where’s _why?”Submitted _why's Estate as a story · 287 points
HN discussion> Furthermore, today's computing environments are arguably less conducive to autodidactism. You might be interested in this if you haven't seen it before: http://viewsourcecode.org/why/hacking/theLittleCodersPredica...
Comment linking /why/hacking/theLittleCodersPredicament.html
on “MIT is a national treasure”Submitted Build Your Own Text Editor (2017) as a story · 236 points
HN discussionFor project-based tutorials/books, which are centred around building a program step-by-step by following a series of human-readable diffs, I think a tool is very much needed. For https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/02.enteringRawMode... , the code is kept in a git repo where each commit is a step in the tutorial. This way steps can be modified, reordered, or split into more steps using git interactive rebase (…
Comment linking /snaptoken/kilo/02.enteringRawMode.html
on “The Tools I Use to Write Books”Submitted _why's Estate as a story · 191 points
HN discussionSomebody put together a page of code and writings of _why[0]. [0]: https://viewsourcecode.org/why/
Comment linking /why/
on “Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)”Submitted Build Your Own Text Editor as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThis book always brings back good memories for me. If you are interested in diving deeper into _why's work you can find a comprehensive catalogue of his public works here https://viewsourcecode.org/why/ .
Comment linking /why/
on “Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)”Submitted Build Your Own Text Editor as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI'm trying to recreate https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/ but in Zig, will probably have to face shit metric ton of hate after finishing it due to probably some mistakes and sharing them online in form of a guide, but I'm doing it to learn myself, hope that project will improve by people posting issues or simply forking the project when I will finish it.
Comment linking /snaptoken/kilo/
on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)”Submitted Build Your Own Text Editor as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAnyone interested in the machinations of all of this terminal stuff should look at antirez’ kilo, a terminal text editor in under 1000 lines of code: https://github.com/antirez/kilo There is a nice tutorial that walks through how one might write it from scratch: https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/
Comment linking /snaptoken/kilo/
on “What happens when you press a key in your terminal?”Submitted Build Your Own Text Editor as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAs far as I understand, he quit his public life when someone hunted down and published his real name and address. He removed his website and github, which contained his various writings, some of which had names with "tutorial" or "guide" in them but all of which were at least 80% works of literature and at most 20% works of technical documentation. Not sure I would call it "ragequitting". Virtually all his works wer…
Comment linking /why/redhanded/
on “Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14 (1971)”Submitted _why's Estate as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> I've tried many IDEs but I'll always come back to vim. Vim and Emacs both have GUIs. As an Emacs user, I subjectively find the GUI superior - I can e.g. rebind Cmd-S to "save", and that's a reason enough. > It's a language you learn [...] You mean the serial lines and ANSI escape codes and termcap? I would say it's more like pidgin with a dozen obscure dialects, and a body language on top. Try writing a portable T…
Comment linking /snaptoken/kilo/
on “WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser”Submitted Build Your Own Text Editor as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHe's a top notch high and low-level programmer with excellent taste for API design (and a language geek). He's also a talented poet/writer, painter/cartoonist/web designer and composer/singer/musician. From ~2002 to 2009, he released a tremendous amount of material (dozens of code projects, thousands of blog posts), then disappeared abruptly, deleting almost everything he had ever published. His blog posts were humo…
Comment linking /why/hackety.org/
on “A letter from _why”Submitted Two Ruby Giants: _why Interviews DHH on Christmas Eve, 2004 as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> you can use `stty` to change a lot of stuff about the terminal, including how it deals with inputs > You can rewire all of these defaults and behaviors I've also found this article on implementing a terminal text editor to be illuminating: https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/ https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/02.enteringRawMode... Also, just in case anyone is wondering, as I once did, where many of t…
Comment linking /snaptoken/kilo/02.enteringRawMode.html
on “Entering text in the terminal is complicated”Submitted The Little Coder's Predicament as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYou may "enjoy" this essay from a while back https://viewsourcecode.org/why/hacking/theLittleCodersPredic...
Comment linking /why/hacking/theLittleCodersPredicament.html
on “The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code”Submitted The Little Coder's Predicament as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
