After hitting my head against a few different open source Swift text editor implementations, I ended up settling on a webview with a Monaco in the Swift app. The syntax highlighting isn’t exactly how I want but if in reality, this has changed for me several times over the years as I’ve moved between tools and I’ll probably get over it.

I’ve gotten really pulled into building this thing, inspired by Perfect Software, because I’ve started to see all the little ways in which I can make it mine, in a way that is hard to accomplish with commercial software. With open source software, you can fork, but you inherit the whole project rather than the bits and pieces you want. To me, it feels like the average personal software is going to be simpler than that.

On a different note, I think I’ve gotten pulled so far into this because coding agents (Claude Code) make it so easy (addicting?) to do just one more thing. I’ve been doing one more thing for two days now.

That said, I do have something to show for it. We see if it sticks.