Okay, so I made a text editor starting by catting some code to a file, and then using it to edit itself. It's still kind of painful to use. What would I need to get it to the point of being not painful? - The idea of a current point that can move around in the text. Search is fine as a way of specifying a place to go to, but it is painful to have to specify the place every time - The ability to type more than one line at a time. With carriage returns! - The ability to save without exiting. - Catching the exception when I type an invalid pattern. - Only displaying the text near the current point, instead of the whole file. - Some kind of cut and paste, so I can reorder things I've already written, without retyping them. If I had the above, I think it would bring this editor more or less to parity with, say, Notepad, for me. From there, I would need only a couple of amenities to make it better than Notepad. In the "nice to have" category: - Immediate input (without having to type a carriage return each time), which would also allow deleting text in a more direct way. - With that would come arrow keys. - Backing up the original input file. - Saving to the original input file. - Exiting without saving. Still, not bad for 45 minutes.