

Ask HN: What's the Future of Code Editors? - akumpf

Hey HN,<p>I&#x27;ve been thinking&#x2F;making lots of different creative tools over the past many years, but the code editor is one that I keep coming back to. I figure this is one of the best groups to poll since there&#x27;s a mix of tech, design, development, and start-up readers who all likely interact with code at some point.<p>Q. What do you think the most important next step will be for code editors?<p>Over the past few years we&#x27;ve started to see lots of cool things (like alternate layouts, realtime syntax highlighting, auto-folding code, collaboration, etc.). But what do you think is next?<p>From my perspective, the biggest change I&#x27;d love to see is the code editor moving beyond plain text. While the code itself must be machine translatable, the meta-level content (comments, links, diagrams, etc.) could be much more informative and useful; even interacting with and highlighting the code&#x2F;text itself.<p>I&#x27;ve also been working on a notebook webapp called Sketchwrite and think that could be a way to kickstart the conversation about getting plain text and embedded content to play well together.<p>Sketchwrite is pretty basic; it just combines sketches and writing. However, the way it keeps images and text in sync is different than what you typically find in text&#x2F;image hybrid environments (like text editors which use relative anchors or explicit object boxes, and image editors which use absolute positioning for each element or layer); instead Sketchwrite anchors are implicit to what&#x2F;where you draw on the page and flow with the text.<p>Clearly Sketkchwrite isn&#x27;t the answer here (without a whole lot of re-work), but I think something like it that&#x27;s tuned for code could be pretty cool. For example, here&#x27;s a quick proof-of-concept of a javascript file with embedded drawings&#x2F;callouts.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sketchwrite.com&#x2F;n&#x2F;VNpCzRv5r38 (see comment below for clickable link)
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akumpf
Forgot that links don't show up in the original HN question.

Here's the quick proof-of-concept of a javascript file with embedded
drawings/callouts in Sketchwrite.

[https://sketchwrite.com/n/VNpCzRv5r38](https://sketchwrite.com/n/VNpCzRv5r38)

