For a while now I've been thinking things over, and I've decided to embrace a new direction for 4coder.

To anyone using 4coder, don't worry I am not about to leave you without an editor. This is actually not really a big change for users, because the project has been naturally pushing in this direction for a while. I just haven't officially embraced and announced the change until now.

Basically what I've come to realize is that the original vision of code intelligence that I set out to experiment with has fallen away. There are a few reasons for this.

1. Lots of people are exploring the low level space with new languages in the hopes of replacing C/C++. It seems like a waste to specialize in code intelligence for a language that might get replaced with one or more better languages soon.

2. Even if code intelligence in C/C++ would increase productivity for some time, I don't see it as the thing that would have the most value. When 4coder first came to Linux, it was the f

So I just got a new build out today (4.0.19) fixing some lingering problems with Unicode and the Lexer. As I explained last month, I'm starting work on a new buffer engine now, but it's going to be a little while before that is ready, so I'm splitting my 4coder time between that and small builds like this one. By the way, that new engine is not yet at a demonstration point, but I did have a break through on how to solve virtual whitespace + comments interactions, which has been puzzling me for a while, so I'm even more optimistic about the new system now.

The primary point of this post is to list a few of the things I wanted to look into for this build but decided pushed to next one or two future 4.0.X builds as I continue to split my time:

• Cltr+Alt = AltGr option to config file
• Dead keys as modified command keys
• Customizable keywords for the 4coder lexer
• Command line font and theme selection
• See more than 10 fonts in the font list (bug fix)
• Properly handle read

Hey everyone!

The newest version of 4coder, 4.0.18, will be the first to feature full unicode support. As of today I have all of the unicode features working that I want for the build. 4coder now translates UTF8 into codepoints, and the font system supports rendering all the codepoints provided by a font. I restructured the font system so that now users can drop .ttf files into the new font folder and 4coder will load them at launch. It looks like everything will be ready to ship in just a few days, once I finish doing a few details here and there.

4coder 4.0.X gets pushed to the limit I first announced that I was going to begin working on line wrapping and unicode support back in September 2016 . I did not fully explain why I saw those two features as related, because I was not sure if my vision for the system was actually going to work, and I wanted to wait until I had really seen everything up close first.

Back then I started to suspect that I would need a dram

A history of 4coder Fridays

The term "4coder Friday" was first coined by Casey Muratori, back in late 2015/early 2016. That was about the time that Handmade Hero started making the transition to using 4coder and so occasionally a little bit of prestream time was dedicated to exploring the configuration. It wasn't every Friday, nor was it always on Fridays, but the term 4coder Friday was just so fun to say that it stuck.

In February of 2016 I switched to using 4coder full time, so that I could make sure it was prepared for Handmade Hero to make the transition to full time 4coder use. In March 2016 that transition was completed and ever since there have been no 4coder Fridays... or have there?

4coder Fridays in the Modern Day

That was all a year ago, which means it is practically ancient in internet time. So what is a '4coder Friday' in this modern day and age!? The answer is that 4coder Friday is what happens every Friday when I set aside work for m

So it's been over two years since I started 4coder, and I don't think I properly slowed down and cleaned anything up at all during the 2016 portion. I can't even remember what 2015 4coder was like, but I figure I probably was even less disciplined back then. So for that reason the project I took up a while ago of carefully considering the organization of the code and the major systems is still going on. Since cleanup doesn't lend itself to new features I have also split my 4coder time between little features I can implement through the custom API and the cleanup work.

As I discussed in an upcoming 'Handmade After Dark' episode, I have a new more strict schedule and special office space. With that comes sessions of 4coder work that can go as long as eight hours without having to interrupt the flow of my thoughts. If I have learned one thing from the experience, it is that I am definitely not the sort of person who can work as well a couple hours every day as I can all at once in

This is a post to briefly describe the new 4coder project file feature in alpha 4.0.14.

The feature is meant to support the common situation where just having one build rule that is always in a "build.bat" or "build.sh" for the entire project is not always enough. Obviously anyone with access to the customisation layer has always been able to extend this, but the project file system creates some built in project configuration possibility. It also solves several other smaller issues, but we'll get to that in a minute.

The way it works is you create a "project.4coder" file in the root directory of the project. With 4coder running you can launch a project by navigating to the directory containing the project file and running 'load project'. Loading the project also opens all the code in the directory. Unlike the 'open all code' version, this version reads an extensions setting out of the project file, so you can set any set of extensions to open with the project.

Once the pr

Through November I have been building up an information site for 4coder and today I posted it at 4coder.net. I still need to fill in lots of the information which I will continue to do over the next few days. A lot of people have asked for different information pages including a features list, a road map, and tutorials, all of which will be going on the site. I will also be posting the 4coder API documentation there from now on. If there is any category of information you would like to have on 4coder that is missing let me know!

For the next month of work on 4coder I will continue building out the information on the site and I will work on inner 4coder system clean up and finally building the basic testing apparatus I've been hinting at from time to time for a while now. I plan to post a couple of new builds in December for bug fixes and tweaks to the indentation system.

That is it for my end of November update, later people!

Hi everyone!

It has been a big month for 4coder. Just today I released alpha 4.0.12. I finally switched over to the gap buffer, and eliminated the transitional framework that I first constructed eleven months ago. Getting rid of that extra complexity bought me a great deal of room in my "complexity budget", and I spent it on new features in the buffer system.

The immediate upgrades are the systems for arbitrary wrap positions, and virtualized white space at the beginning of lines, which have allowed me to create a code smart line wrapping system, or "code wrapping". Just enabling code wrapping can make you a little faster by eliminating a lot of left-to-right scrolling you may have been doing in the past. It also makes it so that you never spend a single keystroke manipulating lead white space. I look forward to iterating on this idea and related ideas for a while to see how much we can all get out of it. There may also be some higher order benefits but I won't go into a l

Dear everyone,

Two weeks ago I shared version 1.0 of the 4cpp lexer with my backers on Patreon, and I promised after a two week period, everyone who came here to this fabulous handmade.network would have free access to the library. But since then I have made a few improvements to the system. The new improvements make the system even easier to use, more efficient, and expose the entire relex system, which now supports the same input chunking that the main lexer supports. Therefore today I'm not going to release the library that I promised to release two weeks ago. Instead I am going to release 4cpp v1.1 !

Right this very instant you can go to 4coder's main page, and get the source under the "Download" tile.

To make your life even better I've put the download link right here!

Enjoy everyone!

A long long time ago, at least a year ago, I decided I would contribute the code parsing system in 4coder as free and open software for our community. I released a little example of what I thought it might be like way back then on Patreon, but since then there's been nothing. I've been waiting because I just wanted to make sure that when I actually "released" something it would be really well thought through.

As of this morning I think a release lexer is ready and I have prepared the package!

The lexer supports all sorts of fancy complex features, like arbitrarily chunked source data, output rate limiting, and user controlled allocation. All with an API that leaves the user in control 100% of the time. As well as a convenience level API for making quick tools that just want to pass in a file and get out the tokens with 0 micromanagement.

Today I will make an early release of the library to all of my backers on Patreon since their support has made this side project possible

Today is my first day of classes in my sixth semester of school at the University of Michigan. I would like to assure everyone updates will still be coming to 4coder and I will continue to stay on top of bug reports and feature requests, but I will be moving more slowly. Last year during my second semester of school I managed to implement: build in editor, keyboard internationalization (although that is a forever ongoing project with Windows), word completion, the first version of direct buffer manipulation API, the query replace and replace range functions, and a Linux port (thanks insofaras!). Hopefully this school year will be similarly productive for 4coder.

Right now I am working on bringing together all of the work I did through the month of August to make 4.0.11 really great. That includes a better file tracker that eliminates a lot of passive per frame CPU usage, a new faster lexer, and access to a file's tokens in the customization API.

Stay tuned this week for an an

If you follow the posts on the 4coder Patreon right now, then you know that I stopped posting the 4coder GUI blog posts because I stopped working on the GUI for a little while. What I have been working on was mostly less glamorous. I've been fixing bugs eliminating confusing APIs, both internally and the API exposed for customizations. I've been reimplementing everything I can through the custom API. Most recently what I have done was to use the custom API to construct a new build and goto error work flow. There are twelve internal commands that I can still shift to the custom side. Once that is done, it will be time for the GUI work to resume.

In last week's post I discussed the rough plan for making 4coder GUI customizable. That plan is somewhat theoretical, and the implementation only began a few days ago. But for the most part knowing that the system will be immediate mode basically informs the rest of the design. There may be a few things that would be done differently if I knew I was dealing with hooks up front, I may do a little more to help the user manage their state, rather than just assuming they'll be able to do whatever they want. Even still, I don't think it would be too difficult to make those tweaks. One way or the other the user will declare a GUI every frame based on whatever rule they want, and the behaviors I want to support are the same either way. So all together I think it is the "immediate mode" part that informs everything else.

Starting from there, the thing that has been the biggest difficulty is the scrolling system. "Insofaras", 4c

Last week I discussed all the goals of the 4coder GUI system I have been developing. Now I will look into detail on how I plan to achieve the first big goal: giving the entire GUI to the custom layer and making it as easy as possible.

Any talk about ease of use and GUI will wind up being a talk about how great immediate mode is, and I have already talked about this on a previous blog post. In the 4coder GUI the API design is immediate mode. But because of all the other constraints on the 4coder GUI system, some aspects of it do not look like a typical immediate mode system. I will discuss those points more in future blog posts.

What I want to talk about today is the difference between a library and an engine. 4coder's customization API is not a library, it is an engine. The main difference being that the user of an engine writes code that does not have one controlling stack frame, the user is always expected to return ba

The primary goal for the 4.0.x family of 4coder versions is to figure out the actual GUI system that 4coder will use and to give absolute control over the GUI to the custom layer. I want to see users be able to delete the code that adds the scroll bar to the file, or write up a tool bar for functions they would rather not tie to a key-combos, or to create drop down menus for their custom word completing system, or to trivially modify open file and new file to work exactly the way they want. It was the big topic on my mind for about six straight weeks.

Recently, I having been trying to figure out the best way to describe everything I have learned in a blog post, but it just does not boil down to a succinct string of text. So starting this week I will begin writing a blog post every week until I have described every last detail. I hope you are prepared for a long journey to catching up with 4coder GUI, because it's time to begin.

"To solve the problem, you must know the

Hey folks,

Today I am announcing the first 4coder build to come out of the "Summer of 4coder". This new build is the first to feature the GUI system I have discussed in older blog posts, and now that it is out I will take a little more time to describe some of what I discovered, what I have come up with so far, and what I would like to do even better.

In the mean time if you are supporting the project be sure to go check out the new build!

One whole month has passed but there has not been a single 4coder update. I was hoping all month that today there would be an update with new GUI stuff ready to go, but it's just not going to happen. The new theme editor is getting there pretty quickly, and there are some other improvements I would like to have in the next version. Specifically I want to address the high idle CPU usage by going to a system that is more event driven.

Now for the good news. With school year over though the way is cleared for an entire summer of 4coder. I have high hopes for huge updates this summer. I plan to open the customization layer up even more. These new upgrades will hopefully facilitate projects like 4coder vim keys (by ChronalDragon) and providing a customizable GUI for various debugger projects that have cropped up. But my biggest goal of the summer is to start cracking the code intelligence that I was imagining when I first started

So thanks to the works of the Handmade Dev guys, 4coder is going to have a new home right here on handmade.network!

I mean first of all, the projects are all exciting and I just want to be nearby when awesome stuff happens, but also... look at this site I mean for literally no work at all the 4coder blog suddenly looks about a hundred times better than it did back when I was trying to design it myself. Also did you notice how fast everything is? It is off the hook people.

If you want to check out the old blog, if it is still up you can find it here. My plan is to eventually ditch that blog entirely and move all the old posts here. So from now on you can just follow my absurd blog posting here.

Thanks a ton to the handmade dev guys.

Later everyone!

The following parts of the Software are separately licensed as follows:

• The Liberation font family is licensed under the SIL Open Font License (version 2 onwards). The full text of this license is available in the accompanying 3rdparty/sil.txt file

• The Hack font family is licensed under the a modified SIL license The full text of this license is available in the accompanying 3rdparty/hacksil.txt file

• The Inconsolata font family is licensed under the SIL Open Font License Copyright (c) 2011, Raph Levien ([email protected]), Copyright (c) 2012, Cyreal (cyreal.org) The full text of this license is available in the accompanying 3rdpart/sil.txt

• The Cutive font family is licensed under the SIL Open Font License Copyright (c) 2012 by vernon adams ([email protected]) The full text of this license is available in the accompanying 3rdpart/sil.txt

4coder-alpha License

The Software ("4coder", "4ed.exe") is Copyright 2015 by Four Tech LLC, all rights are reserved. Anyone who has purchased a copy of the Software, ("The User"), is granted a personal, non-assignable, non-transferable, license to use the Software for personal or commercial uses.

The User may not redistribute, sub-license, or resell the Software. The User is permitted to make an unlimited number of copies of the Software which are subject the the aforementioned restrictions.

The Software is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including without limitation any implied warranties of condition, uninterrupted use, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement.