awesome-structure-editors

Yes, I think that we can do better than plain text as the source of truth, and thus git would probably need to change. There's work around a bunch of languages that are not based on text, some have their own editor or a tool to manage a canonical representation in text for you that would make them friendlier to git. - https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors/blob/main/README.md

> There's many more akin projects listed in https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors/blob/ma... Awesome link! How did you find that link btw? I feel like I scoured the web so many times on this topic and missed all of this stuff. > I can't wait fast enough for these ideas to reshape how we deal with programs and build stuff. Same here. I feel like we can't leave plain text completely behind though. There has to be some two-way sync to the structured model.

For a step back moving away from text into ASTs there's a bunch of interesting projects. * https://unisonweb.org: Unison, a programming language that abstracts names and builds a store of canonical functions * https://lamdu.org: Lamdu, a programming language that's meant to be edited as a tree and it's accompanying editor. There's many more akin projects listed in https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors/blob/ma... I can't wait fast enough for these ideas to reshape how we deal with programs and build stuff. Also, I wouldn't take too much credit away from projects like Pijul that, maybe more practically, slowly steer us where we want to go. I find it hard to believe that something new will suddenly replace everything given the sheer amount of things that would be left behind and can't rapidly be ported into new shiny tech

See https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors

It would be interesting to have such a general project go somewhere. While in principle structural editing sounds like an incredible advance, there are 'good enough' advantages to plain-text tools that make it a much more practical solution. The other issue is of course integration with existing tooling, which you either skip entirely or compromise on the design. What I feel is missing, between the description of "old, bad state of things" and "utopian vision" is a review of some of the projects that already tried to achieve this ideal state. It turns out there are a number of them, and most of them failed to achieve any traction or impact [0]. The rants are very long, so I skimmed quickly the one about git; I understand the complaints, although git is only bringing me joy and no pain --interactive rebase, absorb and a few aliases made it