
Ask HN: What is missing from modern editors? - thomasleese
What features do you think are missing from modern text editors and IDEs that you think would help while programming?<p>Personally, I&#x27;ve not found an editor which has a live editing diff view where new lines are highlighted green and deleted lines are still visible but highlighted red which I think would be useful.
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kek918
I'd like every editor to have a universal function to show a list of keyboard
shortcuts, for instance the F1 button (because this is regarded as "Help" in
Windows environment).

I often use different editors (and on different computers), so keyboard
shortcuts may differ. Sometimes I can't remember the shortcut for what I want
to do, so it would be very handy to press F1 and see a little cheatsheet of
all the available shortcuts, instead of opening the settings menu and clicking
through 4-5 submenus to find it.

Other than that I'm quite happy with todays editors. I'm coding in both
Windows and Linux environments and all my editors works great for both.

For larger projects I use Netbeans 8.2 (Web backend and frontend). It comes
with everything I need out of the box, the only plugin I sometimes use is the
Zend HTML thingy (for creating HTML markup macros).

For Python projects I use Jetbrain Pycharm.

For anything else where I don't really need advanced features like PHPdoc or
autocomplete I tend to open Atom (previously Sublime Text until the Atom hype
got me).

~~~
rerx
Emacs has had this for ages, in various sophisticated levels (since there are
_a lot_ of key bindings).

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supacruz
Sublime Text packages do a good job of adding new features. E.g. for diff
view, you can use [https://github.com/kemayo/sublime-text-
git](https://github.com/kemayo/sublime-text-git) (which gives you a nicely
colored diff output), and
[https://github.com/jisaacks/GitGutter](https://github.com/jisaacks/GitGutter)
as a bonus to see which lines have changed directly in the gutter. Latest
version even displays the diff itself in a popup on rollover. Pretty handy.

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samblr
I believe in something cool like this: a package manager should be 'somehow'
coupled with your editor.

The editor should install shortcuts to often-used-code patterns of a package
that you just installed.

In webstorm - on typing 'descnew' I get like 12-15 lines of boiler plate [0]
(descnew = describe new test group - have a live template setup in webstorm).
I am sure many use feature like this - but wouldn't that be cool if it comes
packaged and are universal between editors.

[0] [http://imgur.com/dVYFDYN](http://imgur.com/dVYFDYN)

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LarryMade2
A decent print source routine. Eclipse is useless for printing source (margins
are whack, at least in linux) and I'm not sure if Sublime is able to print at
all yet.

an as you type highlighting spelling checker - hopefully that would
distinguish between code and text/comment blocks.

an FTP manager.

~~~
rerx
Have you tried Kate for printing source?

~~~
LarryMade2
Yeah works great! But extra steps involved to get things to Kate... Havent
used Kate much since KDE 3.5 _sigh_

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edoceo
I'll pay $100 to get SFTP working properly in Atom

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runjake
Speed, simplicity, lack of bloat.

