
Ask HN: What is the one (impossible) thing you wish your editor could do? - tisker
If you could magically wish an IDE&#x2F;Editor feature into existence, possible or impossible, what would it be?
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themodelplumber
I have a separate Batcave editor which I use in parallel to my coding
editor...

Anyway, for the Batcave editor I wish it could detect a need to reorganize a
markdown file, based on triggers like "everything added to this text file
lately is going under a log heading, instead of into a table of contents and
hierarchical organization." Then it would give me some previews of what a
reorganization could look like.

There is a periodic need to completely redo the way I think about, research,
or catalog things, and this would be a huge help.

~~~
tisker
Interesting, I like this one. This seems like something GPT-3 might be able to
do with some fine-tuning.

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karmakaze
Translate whichever programming language codebase is in, into a language of my
choice, let me make edits, save back in original language. When I come back to
the same code, it should show what I wrote in preferred language, not a
translation from what was saved.

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nic_m
Honestly, a tool that can translate business logic into SQL code. Writing 8
level deep SQL queries trying to create hypothetical business situations is a
bit much.

~~~
tisker
I feel your pain, that would be amazing.

~~~
cell9840179419
Sounds like what Enterprise Java Beans with persistence layer tried to do.

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cell9840179419
Find sets of words not necessarily on the same line, replace them.

Usecase. First and Last names should be replaced with another first and last
name, singly or doubly.

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ksaj
Autocitation with Autofill. You write what you remember of the source material
you wish to cite, highlight it, and the editor finds the source, corrects any
errors and missing bits, then adds it to the properly formatted numbered
index.

I'm guessing you are looking for code-related features, but there are also
documentation and technical papers to worry about.

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lucinda_dev
I work at a company where a large and important part of the software stack
sits on really old legacy infrastructure. Everyone is too scared to touch it.
A feature that automatically converts the legacy code to a modern
language/framework so that it can be transferred to newer infrastructure.

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tisker
I'll start: The ability to automatically find and repair bugs, while
traversing the project structure to fix the related issues in relevant files.

