Ask HN: What is the one (impossible) thing you wish your editor could do?

6 points by tisker 5 years ago | 10 comments

If you could magically wish an IDE/Editor feature into existence, possible or impossible, what would it be?

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 5 years ago | |

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

karmakaze 5 years ago |

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.

nic_m 5 years ago |

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 5 years ago | |

I feel your pain, that would be amazing.

cell9840179419 5 years ago | | |

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

cell9840179419 5 years ago |

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.

ksaj 5 years ago |

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.

lucinda_dev 5 years ago |

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.

tisker 5 years ago |

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