A rope can be a very attractive data structure for text editors. A rope has a lot of nice properties for editing in particular because it splits the file up into several smaller allocations which allow for very fast amortized insertions or deletions at any point in the file, O(lg n). At first glance, it would seem that a rope addresses all of my initial concerns because operations like undo/redo can more easily be implemented in terms of a tree snapshot (or retaining the removed or changed nodes) and multi-