If you could magically wish an IDE/Editor feature into existence, possible or impossible, what would it be?
Ask HN: What is the one (impossible) thing you wish your editor could do?
1–10 of 11 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the one (impossible) thing you wish your editor could do?
#2I'll start: The ability to automatically find and repair bugs, while traversing the project structure to fix the related issues in relevant files.
Re: Ask HN: What is the one (impossible) thing you wish your editor could do?
#3I 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.
Re: Ask HN: What is the one (impossible) thing you wish your editor could do?
#4Honestly, 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.
Re: Ask HN: What is the one (impossible) thing you wish your editor could do?
#5Honestly, 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.
I feel your pain, that would be amazing.
Re: Ask HN: What is the one (impossible) thing you wish your editor could do?
#6I 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.
Re: Ask HN: What is the one (impossible) thing you wish your editor could do?
#7Find 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.
Re: Ask HN: What is the one (impossible) thing you wish your editor could do?
#8Re: Ask HN: What is the one (impossible) thing you wish your editor could do?
#9I 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…
Interesting, I like this one. This seems like something GPT-3 might be able to do with some fine-tuning.
Re: Ask HN: What is the one (impossible) thing you wish your editor could do?
#10Autocitation 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.