Yedex [WIP]
Yedex is a feature-rich formatted text editor for Android, planned to be released open-source this fall and containing no ads or popups. Some of the included features are:
In contrast to many other mobile text editors, Yedex requires no premium version or similar to unlock all features. Online syncing is not planned, but might be added in a future update.
Screenshots
TODO
History
There are already thousands of text editors out there. That being said, why did I have to make one of my own? That’s a very good question, and I’ll try to answer it like this:
When you first start programming, it opens up a whole new world of possibilities to you. Whether you wanted to learn a programming language because of a specific project, a class in school or just out of boredom, right off the bat you always get a ton of ideas for what you could be making, even if you should first learn some other important stuff like how to actually code in the language.
In my specific case, I started thinking about custom programming languages, operating systems and: text editors. There are always some tiny tweaks you want your variation of the program to have, and for me (as a perfectionist) that was … Well, intricate stuff no normal user would ever recognize existed. I would always make some tests and sketches of how those projects would look and feel, but of course I knew that I wasn’t nearly experienced enough to actually finish any of them. So, I instead started work on some realistic projects and continued theorizing about the others in the background. If you’ve read my history page, you’ll already how that ended.
Now, three years have passed and it’s January 2021. The Corona pandemic has hit the world and you’re “forced” to stay inside. As if programmers would ever do anything different, you think to yourself. You have no active projects at the moment, and so you decide to open Android Studio and create a new project. This time: a text editor the world has never seen before! Fits quite well with the whole “Corona” theme, doesn’t it?
The project I created then was my first attempt of what’s now called “Yedex” and the code used there I cleverly recycled for very early prototypes of the final app. The problem with my first version was that I started with the file overview screen. I wanted to make a text editor and started with a file overview screen, especially when I already knew I’m infamous for not finishing any of my projects! As you might guess, I gave up two weeks later. And created a new version. This time, I started with the actual editor part of the app and had an overall very minimalistic plan for the project. I tried out a few features and then restarted the project again.
What I haven’t told you so far is that I had set myself a goal for this project: Finish it, or give up on programming. And I really did not want to give up on programming. That way I persisted throughout the whole project. I might have been a little less motivated at times, but that usually faded away again within a few days and I continued my quest to finish this project. The original goal for this version was similar to the second one: One screen for the editor, one for settings, done. Formatted text was one of the requirements for my project, so I had planned simple Slack-like markdown to omit the need for extra dialogs. In the original version, I had actually intended there to be only one global file which could then be divided into chapters by the user, all just to leave out the file overview screen.
By now, I’ve been working on Yedex for seven months, if you only count the current version. This is the longest I’ve ever persisted on any project, and I hope it’ll stay that way.