Hey HN,
I've been thinking/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's a mix of tech, design, development, and start-up readers who all likely interact with code at some point.
Q. What do you think the most important next step will be for code editors?
Over the past few years we'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?
From my perspective, the biggest change I'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/text itself.
I'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.
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/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/where you draw on the page and flow with the text.
Clearly Sketkchwrite isn't the answer here (without a whole lot of re-work), but I think something like it that's tuned for code could be pretty cool. For example, here's a quick proof-of-concept of a javascript file with embedded drawings/callouts.
https://sketchwrite.com/n/VNpCzRv5r38 (see comment below for clickable link)
Here's the quick proof-of-concept of a javascript file with embedded drawings/callouts in Sketchwrite.
https://sketchwrite.com/n/VNpCzRv5r38