Hey everyone, quick update today.

I've been getting more and more issues, and I don't have the time to deal with them all when they come in. Plus I've been trying to manage issue reports on the forums here and in my email inbox. Moving forward I will be trying to move all issues to a new public github issues page:

https://github.com/4coder-editor/4coder/issues

Please go fill it up with all your outstanding most important issues!

-Allen

It's still right around the start of a new year, making it a great time (psychologically - for me) to organize thoughts and examine progress on 4coder.

Goal My primary driving goal right now is to get the current version stabilized, build up a few more key features, retire this version and move on to updating the 4coder infrastructure, documentation, and then get on to a new major version.

This is basically the same goal I set last year. I'm not quite on the pace to completing the goal I hoped I would be but I'm also not terribly far off. The biggest problem has been the size of the project growing out of control. Usually my pattern is to alternate between major changes and new features one build, and major cleanup and bug fixes the next build, but the last few builds the cleanup and bug fixes haven't been enough. Problems are coming from all sorts of directions:

[ul]

Intro

It looks like the next build of 4coder (4.0.29) is going to be ready sometime in the next few weeks. The new build has been in development for a couple months and is loaded to the brim with new features that have all gone through interesting architectural and algorithmic design that I believe are worth sharing for several reasons. One it will prepare 4coder users who want to start writing customizations for how to think about the new features. Two it will help anyone who likes to think about the processes of architecture and algorithm design with some examples of my own process. Three it might expose me to some criticisms or suggestions that could help me improve the specifics of the new 4coder features before I put them into the wild.

Directory of all parts: [ol]

Intro

It looks like the next build of 4coder (4.0.29) is going to be ready sometime in the next few weeks. The new build has been in development for a couple months and is loaded to the brim with new features that have all gone through interesting architectural and algorithmic design that I believe are worth sharing for several reasons. One it will prepare 4coder users who want to start writing customizations for how to think about the new features. Two it will help anyone who likes to think about the processes of architecture and algorithm design with some examples of my own process. Three it might expose me to some criticisms or suggestions that could help me improve the specifics of the new 4coder features before I put them into the wild.

Directory of all parts: [ol]

Intro

It looks like the next build of 4coder (4.0.29) is going to be ready sometime in the next few weeks. The new build has been in development for a couple months and is loaded to the brim with new features that have all gone through interesting architectural and algorithmic design that I believe are worth sharing for several reasons. One it will prepare 4coder users who want to start writing customizations for how to think about the new features. Two it will help anyone who likes to think about the processes of architecture and algorithm design with some examples of my own process. Three it might expose me to some criticisms or suggestions that could help me improve the specifics of the new 4coder features before I put them into the wild.

Directory of all parts: [ol]

Err sorry... somehow I accidentally posted the topic twice. Please read and comment here:

https://4coder.handmade.network/blogs/p/3263-the_evolution_of_4coders_new_lister_api#15820

Hello everyone! In lieu of a 4coder Friday this week I am going to explain the direction of the Lister API and how it has surprisingly affected some of my long term plans for 4coder.

The Original Lister API Plan

When I first set out to create a Lister API the idea was to just provide a short term hack that would hold over users who want to customize the file lists in 4coder, and who want to create similar lists for other commands. I assumed it would be temporary because I want 4coder's customization layer to expose more than just lists for user controlled UI. I wanted at least to support tables, and probably a number of other basic UI schemes, but I was convinced that to do that right the best option would be to integrate those features into the buffer system, so that there would just be a set of code paths for editing buffers and rendering them and no separate UI mode. Since that was the plan in my head I was convinced I was just going in to make a quick hack API that

Hey everyone!

After yesterday's 4coder Friday stream I was trying to come up with a list of things I should do next, and I decided that the next thing to do was the listing API, but since that could be a four to six week endeavor I thought I should get all my recent tweaks out first. So I just published 4.0.28 which you can get here.

Next I'm on to exposing that listing UI to the custom API and implementing all the cool stuff I can think of with that feature.

-Allen

Hey everyone!

With this build, my first step of the 4.0.X retirement schedule is complete!

The majority of the new features were already working a week ago, so I got to spend some good time using them, and I'm very happy with this build. The new project system in particular has simplified my workflow even more than the old project system. This build also moves several more options to the config file, specifically font size, and control over the scroll bar and file bar. Until now these were all controlled by command line parameters, or hard coded values in the custom layer.

You can check this build out at: https://4coder.itch.io/4coder And you can see the accompanying project tutorial here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FX8WPI2WGVI&t=2s

Next I'll be moving on to making the listing UI programmable from the custom layer, which will be a key component of a lot of edit operations and work flow features.

Thanks for following!

Hey everyone.

Just a quick announcement that a new 4coder build has just gone live. 4.0.26 is the first new build in 2018 and the beginning of the 4.0.X retirement plan. This build fixes a lot of the bugs that have been reported since the end of 4coder November, which was the last time I made a major push.

With this build done I will now begin executing the schedule I laid out in my previous post.

Later everyone!

Heyo everyone!

I've been a bit quiet on the blog here as my life has been in a state of constant change since January. I did some 4coder Friday streams in February and March in which I established a testing system for 4coder - something it has desperately needed for about a year. I didn't do much besides respond to questions and bug reports in April, but I did have time to think over exactly how I want the next few steps forward to look. So here's what I am thinking will come next for 4coder:

I. The last few features for 4.0.X. Feature creep is a basically never ending process, so the wisest thing to do might be to say "no more features until the new engine is ready!". But I have gone for quite some time without any new editing features, and after all that time I've built a little list of things I can do without too much difficulty that will be helpful enough to myself and/or other users that they are worth getting in now, before new features become mostly impossibl

When I shut down my Patreon creator page it hides the posts I have made on the site. So this is an archive of my Patreon shutdown post.

Aloha everyone!

I have been looking for the right word(s) to shutdown my Patreon for a few days now. For anyone who doesn't already know, Patreon is changing their fee schedule and they are shifting more costs onto backers, and they are doing all of this with only one way to opt out: get off the platform. And, well, I am opting out.

Now, I want to impress onto all of you that this is absolutely not goodbye for 4coder. I will be where I have always been moving the project forward absolutely uninterrupted by this. However we do have to say goodbye for a brief moment to Patreon. So, in order that we can say goodbye and not at the same time, I turn to the Hawaiian language. That's right folks, this is aloha for us, a word which both means hello and goodbye, and in this way allows us to capture the spirit of moving somew

Hey Everyone!

The month of November has passed, and the last of the 4coder progress has been published on Patreon (the itch.io release in a couple days).

So, considering my original todo list, where did I get? Here is a summary of my original todo list with plusses on the finished items:

[ul]

Hey Everyone!

I just published 4.0.24 on itch.io, check out the devlog for info on what the new build includes.

In this post I want to outline my decision about what to do with one more week of 4coder November. Looking through my original todo list, and my updated todo list, there are a lot of possible candidates. A list of the many things I could pick from this week:

• Query bars that accept commands, such as paste, just like regular buffers
• Undo/redo cleanup and API
• New command mappings to make a more notepad/sublime style configuration
• Easy configuration of keywords available in the built in system
• More sophisticated I/O than pipes to get closer to matching terminal/console behavior
• ... plus more ...

I have decided to cool it and let these all stay on the todo list for now. I would like to have as few bugs in the last build as possible, since it might be a whil

Hey everyone!

As should be expected I got a lot of bug reports on the new Mac build, and the platform reorganization also effected Windows and Linux and I got some bug reports for that too. I've now released a build that should fix all the bug reports I got on 4.0.22, except for the request for full Mac keyboard support, which looks like it's going on the long term todo list.

With bug fixes out of the way, I am now moving on to the things I said I was moving on to when I first released 4.0.22. In fact, I already did a productivity acceleration stream to work on command metadata. I'll do another stream to finish that project sometime this weekend.

Later!

Hey everyone!

As of right now 4coder 4.0.22 is up on the itch.io page. You can get the free version on Windows, Linux or Mac. And for the first time ever you can buy the full version which includes this and all future 4.0.X builds in one purchase.

The new build also features renderer improvements to help speedup rendering, remove some rendering bugs, and speed up the process of tracking down remaining rendering bugs. And there is now room in the system for alternate renderers, further broadening the extent to which I will be able to bring 4coder to more places.

What's Next? With my first big goal for the month achieved, I am now moving on to tightening up lots of 4coder systems. I will be working on handling read only files, handling errors when files fail to save. Then I will be working on the performance and "correctness" of 4coder child process launc

Hey Everyone!

First things first, this entire blog post was written in 4coder on a Mac! It was the first dog fooding I did for the new Mac version of 4coder. If you are reading this, then the first test must have gone pretty well!

Here on the first full week of 4coder November, I am writing, for you, a full-detail list of the things I am working on this month. If your #1 feature request or issue is not on this list let me know, I don't want to forget anything big! Also I won't necessarily get to everything on this list in one month, but I will try to sort important points to the top.

Category: Mac I want to get a new build out to get 4coder on Mac out ASAP. I still don't have file change detection working, which I will need before I launch it. (Side note, this has been one of the hardest parts of the port on every platform.)

In addition to core platform features the new build will feature multiple default bindings that users can switch between. This ch

Hey everyone!

I've got some new plans about the schedule for 4coder builds, and how I will distribute them. I made the full post on Patreon: full post.

Hey there everyone! This post is only a 4coder progress update in the sense that it features some code samples from recently written parts of the 4coder engine update "4.1.X".

This is more of a technical write up for discussion purposes. I have a neat thought about "abstractions" which we discuss a lot in the Handmade community, and to explain it I'd like to talk about the abstractions I have found useful in 4coder, and the abstractions that hurt more than they helped.

Of course I realize I might just be wrong, or my ideas here might just be a poorly developed version of something people have already thought through. So if you've got any suggested reading for me, I'd be happy to take a look. On the other hand if this is somehow useful to anyone else's thought process that is great!

Types of Abstractions I want to make a distinction between two types of abstractions. One, which I will call code semantic abstraction is made by creating reusable bits of code

It seems that it has been a while since there was a 4coder update, but there has been plenty of progress.

Lots of the progress has gone into the new buffer handling engine which is not yet at a point where it does something you can see, but that will change soon. I would estimate that it will be past half way done by this time next month, which is a slightly slower pace than I originally hoped, but it still has the new engine ready well before the end of 2017. Here and there I have also mentioned that 4.1.X will have a pretty big restructuring of the custom API, there isn't any progress on that yet, but even with that I think 4.1.0 will be ready in 2017.

As with the previous builds there have been plenty of improvements to other parts of 4coder that will be coming out very soon. I have finally fixed a great number of rare crashes and other minor bugs that have been piling up on the todo list. I'm working on making the buildsuper.bat script easier to use, because right now it