A good intelligent code editing would either require a good pile of hacks or a completely different approach.<p>Common &quot;text code editors&quot; don&#x27;t understand a thing about the code they edit. They&#x27;re just supplemented with ton of hacks that produce meaningful result in acceptably high number of cases (like regex-based highlighters) but still don&#x27;t have &quot;real&quot; intelligence towards the content of their buffers.<p>And with ever-growing number of hacks the thing&#x27;s unlikely to be small or low on dependencies. You&#x27;ll end up with another emacs&#x2F;vim&#x2F;etc - a fairly small cores, and then a scripting or external tool execution support to do highlighting, parsing, context-aware searching, refactoring etc etc to make them useful for code editing. (And then why bother when we have emacs and vim already?)