Ask HN: What do you want in a text editor?

I'm making a simple open-source text editor (Qt5 wrapper around pandoc, markdown) intended more for journalists, academics and students than web developers -- so it has things like reference support and easy adaption of different citation styles baked in, accurate wordcounts, a distraction free mode, etc. Themes and previewing, as well as pdf creation without tex are already included, and pandoc means almost any output format is trivially easy to implement.

But what features would you like to see added to this list? Draft has its Hemingway mode, for example. What's missing from text editors you think you'd really like?

For academics, you can pry Latex from their cold dead hands, so better include a Latex mode. Personally, I like emacs and I think that modes, aka the plug-in architecture has really a lot of merit, so try to expose as much as possible of the documents to a plug-in api. ( That one only becomes important when your project is very successful, but perhaps it is good thing to keep in mind.)

One thing I would like to see in emacs is something similar to scrivener's corkboard, basically a virtual corkboard were you can place index cards and group them together.

Awesome; but what do you reckon the best way to implement a corkboard is when it's entirely possible that you're dealing with individual documents, not Scrivener's groups of them? (Sorry, that sounds snarky; it's a genuine question; one global corkboard, per folder, or what?)

You already have competition in the form of ReText:

https://github.com/retext-project/retext

(Unless that's the project?)

However, there are some things that ReText does poorly, like syncing between the output window and the input text:

https://github.com/retext-project/retext/issues/108

and some things ReText doesn't really do at all, such as autocompletion of citation labels, checking URLs to see if they are 404, or proper syntax highlighting in math mode.

Those kind of features tend to require doing difficult things like parsing the input, which is why most text editors don't bother.