Let’s try to design a data structure for a text editor.
Seems easy. A text file is just a String.
But…
- Text files can get big.
- Pretty much all common operations will end up being O(n).
- And we’d like undo / redo without storing a copy of the whole file for each change.
What do we do?
Common operations:
- Insert some text.
- Delete some text.
- Replace text (delete + insert?)
- Cut / paste some text.
- Copy / paste some text.
- Line operations (insert, delete, replace, move lines)
How do we do this?
- For extra fun, characters aren’t fixed width.
