Conception – An experimental modern IDE written in Go

Author here. I was just about to go sleep when I noticed a retweet and a lot of new stars on Conception; this explains it.<p>The linked C++ project was the result of an initial year of working on it, which culminated in a winning entry to LIVE 2013 contest [1] and me switching to working on a version of it written completely in Go [2]. I no longer work actively on the C++ version, but I do on the Go one [3].<p>Primarily, it has been an extremely insightful learning experience. I had a lot of ideas and I wanted to try them, and by building Conception I found out the reasons why certain things that are commonly desired do not actually work well in practice, and why our seemingly outdated practices of writing code no different than decades ago are still so predominant and effective.<p>It&#x27;s really interesting to go back to my old notes and goals and, with hindsight, truly understand _why_ they didn&#x27;t work out, and what it would take to make them work.<p>The Go version is go-gettable and working [4] despite having lots of dependences (as proven by the green Travis build). This is one of the benefits of using Go and not the case for C++ version. You can easily try it, but at this point the UI is so far from finished, it&#x27;s not really fit for general use. If you&#x27;re interested, I highly recommend watching the repo so you&#x27;ll see further development. :)<p>[1] <a href="http://liveprogramming.github.io/liveblog/2013/04/live-programming-contest-winners/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;liveprogramming.github.io&#x2F;liveblog&#x2F;2013&#x2F;04&#x2F;live-progr...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/shurcooL/Conception-go" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;shurcooL&#x2F;Conception-go</a><p>[3] <a href="https://github.com/shurcooL/Conception-go/graphs/contributors" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;shurcooL&#x2F;Conception-go&#x2F;graphs&#x2F;contributor...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://github.com/shurcooL/Conception-go#installation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;shurcooL&#x2F;Conception-go#installation</a>

Why should being written in a particular language matter? We see a lot of these “written in Go”s these days for a lot of new softwares. I’m a big user of Go myself. Love the language and use it for almost everything. But I just don’t get why an editor or IDE or static site generator or any other piece of software brag about using a particular language or library.

Sikuli is also based on a similar idea and is written in Python. I am guessing it boils down to preference, but writing code as it is written now involves a lot less &#x27;mouse&#x27; and much more keyboard, which most developers, me included, take for granted. I do agree that currently code written has very high limitations on re-usability, primarily because code is written with a specific project in mind. I believe two things can be done to make it more re-usable: 1) either have all developers write code with the idea in mind that they are writing independent libraries and not code for part of a bigger project so the code becomes much much more modular and decoupled and can be used in other projects on the fly. 2) create an extension which creates a project specific visual map for the code, which would in turn allow other developers to pick and choose code to their liking while having a greater understanding of how the code actually works. This being said, the author&#x27;s efforts are much commendable.

The images are broken for me (503s from Dropbox, and 404s from GitHub cache) - here&#x27;s a direct link to the video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNJ7HqlV55k" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=DNJ7HqlV55k</a>

Is this similar to what Epic Games has been doing with their Unreal Engine, specifically the Blueprint system? The main difference appears to be that you can directly write code, which does seem more powerful. There&#x27;s a lot of power in bridging the gap between developers and designers, would love to see where this goes.

I love the instant update and the tight feedback loop. This is what I actually want when I hack together my <i>inotifywatch</i> command in the shell.<p>But I can&#x27;t do the clicking and dragging. If the layout was automatic and controllable via keyboard, I&#x27;d give this a serious look.

link to Go repo: <a href="https://github.com/shurcooL/Conception-go" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;shurcooL&#x2F;Conception-go</a>

This looks insanely cool (congrats!) but from a purely practical perspective I&#x27;m not sure if I&#x27;d want to use it even if it was a perfect, finished product. After all, I&#x27;d have to forget everything I ever learned about text editors and IDEs.

Lovely. Here is some cheap feedback from a UX perspective.<p>Give a bit of padding to your text blocks<p>Identify clearly the input from output<p>And adding syntax colouring will give it 300% sweetness.

All screenshots are gone in the README,please use github pages instead of hotlinking the repo directly.

Looks similar to Code Bubbles.

The images won&#x27;t load.

Sweet lord, <a href="https://github.com/shurcooL/Conception-go/blob/master/main.go" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;shurcooL&#x2F;Conception-go&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;main.g...</a> is nearly 9k lines long!<p>What a spaghetti. Is that the author or the language?