Hey HN,<p>I've been thinking/making lots of different creative tools over the past many years, but the code editor is one that I keep coming back to. I figure this is one of the best groups to poll since there's a mix of tech, design, development, and start-up readers who all likely interact with code at some point.<p>Q. What do you think the most important next step will be for code editors?<p>Over the past few years we've started to see lots of cool things (like alternate layouts, realtime syntax highlighting, auto-folding code, collaboration, etc.). But what do you think is next?<p>From my perspective, the biggest change I'd love to see is the code editor moving beyond plain text. While the code itself must be machine translatable, the meta-level content (comments, links, diagrams, etc.) could be much more informative and useful; even interacting with and highlighting the code/text itself.<p>I've also been working on a notebook webapp called Sketchwrite and think that could be a way to kickstart the conversation about getting plain text and embedded content to play well together.<p>Sketchwrite is pretty basic; it just combines sketches and writing. However, the way it keeps images and text in sync is different than what you typically find in text/image hybrid environments (like text editors which use relative anchors or explicit object boxes, and image editors which use absolute positioning for each element or layer); instead Sketchwrite anchors are implicit to what/where you draw on the page and flow with the text.<p>Clearly Sketkchwrite isn't the answer here (without a whole lot of re-work), but I think something like it that's tuned for code could be pretty cool. For example, here's a quick proof-of-concept of a javascript file with embedded drawings/callouts.<p>https://sketchwrite.com/n/VNpCzRv5r38 (see comment below for clickable link)