The Piece Table - the Unsung Hero of Your Text Editor
The piece table is a data structure used in text editors to efficiently manage file content during editing. It avoids performance issues associated with inserting text by using an append-only buffer for new content. This approach improves efficiency, especially for large files, by minimizing memory reallocation and data shifting.
- ▪The piece table consists of two buffers: an unmodified original buffer and an append-only add buffer.
- ▪Text insertions are written to the add buffer, preserving performance by avoiding the need to shift existing data.
- ▪Visual Studio Code and Microsoft Word 2.0 both use or have used piece tables for efficient text editing.
Lobsters files mainly under programming. We currently carry 187 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | DEV Community |
| Canonical URL | https://dev.to/_darrenburns/the-piece-table---the-unsung-hero-of-your-text-editor-al8 |
| Publication time | Sat, 16 May 2026 21:56:59 -0500 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-17T03:10:19.134Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-17T03:10:19.134Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | i_Idek8yqupT |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 125606) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } Darren Burns Posted on Jan 24, 2019 • Originally published at darrenburns.net The Piece Table - the Unsung Hero of Your Text Editor #beginners #datastructures #computerscience The piece table is the unsung hero data-structure that is responsible for much of the functionality and performance characteristics we’ve come to expect from a text editor. Visual Studio Code has one. Microsoft Word 2.0 had one back in 1984.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at DEV Community.
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