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?

Personally, I'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.

[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 → kek918]

Emacs has had this for ages, in various sophisticated levels (since there are a lot of key bindings).

[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 (which gives you a nicely colored diff output), and 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.

[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

[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 → LarryMade2]

Have you tried Kate for printing source?

[LarryMade2 → rerx]

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

[edoceo]

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

[runjake]

Speed, simplicity, lack of bloat.