Over the years I've written quite a number of different text editors. Certainly the simplest way is to manage a long sequence of characters, where you copy everything around to insert any character. Other techniques that I've used include:
- Represent the text file as a doubly linked list of text lines.
- Construct a tree-like data structure (sometimes called a "rope") which starts off as a solid string of characters, but has the ability to split, insert, and delete blocks of text without having to move all the rest of the text around.
Many of the old Borland example books used a text editor as a tutorial example. You can occasionally still find copies of these at used bookstores for nearly free.
