Ivo – a reimagined Unix terminal system
While text editing interfaces could be more polished and modern--the underlying problem that causes your dissatisfaction is the text. Storing code as text is an evolutionary dead end. Storing code graphs in text requires the use of plaintext names for graph references, which binds logic and presentation together. The gap between the goal-completion logic a user comes up with and how they turn those mental instructions into plaintext is an unnecessary jump--an encoding--that produces no end of trivial but infuriating miscommunications.<p>Storing code as pure structure (not XML or anything silly, the serialization is trivial) avoids a huge class of artificial problems we've had to deal with since the dawn of compilers, due to the disconnect between human meaning encoded in plaintext and machine parsing.<p><i>Visualizing</i> code as text--text as the primary view in the MVC, complemented with colours and annotations and hyperlinks and hints--is extremely useful. What we really need is a structural editor with the familiarity and ease of use of a text editor. But that is a hard problem, and more polished text manipulators are a nice stop-gap in the meanwhile.