My First Step Into Building Tools That Build Me
It started as a simple idea during our Master’s project, we were looking for a idea for our project to amaze the class.
My friend, Aditya said – “What if we could make our own Notepad++?”
That’s how Subtle Editor was born. Between me, Aditya and Mayuresh, our team for the development.
The challenge was we had never done anything like this before and at that time were opening up to the idea of different text editors like Atom, Sublime, Notepad++ etc. We had already seen what Atom and Sublime was capable of, still there were some issues with them, the fact that Sublime was paid, Atom was a bit slow and Notepad++ was just being used for taking notes.
With this in our mind, we decided to make a text editor, which would be free for all and would combine all the different capabilities of these different editors available, finally giving a better solution to the people who prefer open source in this world.
At the time, Python was on fire, people were buzzing about it’s capabilities and how it is so easy to use and makes life so peaceful while coding. That is why we chose it with PyQT5, the latest QT application framework available at the time.
Developed with Python and PyQT, this text editor was designed to be lightweight yet powerful — simple enough for everyday use but elegant enough to handle structured coding sessions. It satisfies all the basic requirements of any text editor, like file operations, line numbers, tab colours, text formatting based on language used, complier integrations.
The highlight of the editor was coding without typing, rather we had a option to code with voice. We have used a voice interpreter and a series of commands, when a clear command is given the code is typed out according to the driving logic.
The inspiration for this came from a YouTube video, in which a speaker in a conference was talking about the issues with carpal tunnel syndrome and how typing is hell when suffering from it, the speaker had created a application which would use some unusual commands to write down the code more quickly than you could type.
Note: I tried finding the video, it was 10 years ago…
Anyways, Subtle was a monolithic design, which meant everything was tightly connected — from the text area to syntax highlighting and file handling and literally speaking, the entire code was written in only one file.
It was my first real taste of what it means to build an application end-to-end and how a services architecture is so important in any application you are developing and hoping to extend or scale it’s capabilities.
But what made Subtle Editor special wasn’t just the code — it was the way it taught us to think like software engineers. It became a silent teacher for my friends and me, pushing us to debug, improve, and iterate. It helped us pass our Masters with flying colours, yes — but more importantly, it prepared us for real software challenges.
🖥 Tech Stack: Python, PyQT5
🎯 Role: Design, Development
🌱 Outcome:
- Got great marks because of our effort
- Learned Python and how to work with PyQT
- Got into it and created something we are proud of
- Learned version control and version increments
- A personal milestone in building tools that help others grow
