I have the intention of creating a text editor for TeX, mainly because there don't seem to be very many free ones out there that I'm comfortable with. In all likelihood, this will go down as another project that I start off with high hopes and good intentions, but end up loathing and never thinking about again. Gotta love programming.

I remember trying to make an editor for HTML a few years ago in Visual Basic. Those were easily the worst times ever as far as programming went. No planning or design whatsoever, just straight out spaghetti. Needless to say, after I had gotten as far as creating a GUI (which, of course, in VB is trivial), I was brought to a total halt. I can't remember what wild escapade I went on after that, but chances are it met a similar fate to my poor editor.

Perhaps I will make it using C#. The talk about Windows Forms has been interesting, and has intrigued me to have a go at it. My brief exposure to it thus far has created the impression that it's akin to using Visual Basic to design the GUI, and then using C++ to handle the intricacies of what actually happens when you click a button etc. etc. GUI programming in C++ has been a torture for me, and so I suppose I've got another idealistic notion of C# being the solution to all the problems I've faced and what have you.

Actually, I don't think my aim is so much to create an editor as it is to learn new stuff. In the sense that, I don't know if I will be bitterly disappointed if I come out of the experience with a partially working program, so long as I have learnt something new. Just off the top of my head, integrating the editor with Adobe Reader will be interesting - having a button that converts TeX to PDF, and then opens Adobe Reader with that PDF is not hard (a simple ShellExecute call in C++), but what about when the file is already open in Adobe, and you try to make the PDF again? If there is some API (and there probably is) for interfacing with Reader, I think that will be interesting.

What I want to know is, if I'm able to recognize that a lot of stuff is out of idealizations on my part, why do I keep pursuing them?