Future of Coding is an online community with a welcoming, cooperative, and revolutionary spirit. We are unified in the belief that the common practice of programming is tragically less humane than it could be.

Future of Coding

I've been doing more and more writing lately, and have been wishing for a tool that allows me to write my outlines, drafts, and final compositions in the same editor window with the ability to toggle any of those "layers" on and off at will, merge them, copy selections to new layers, etc. It would work sort of like Photoshop but for writing... I have a feeling these principles could also work as an IDE extension (imagine being able to hide the "code" layer and show only the "comments" layer, or the "documentation" layer). Curious to hear your thoughts, or whether anyone else is working on something similar?

The concept here of standoff annotations is similar to what I've been improving in Zep, with its 'RangeMarkers' as I call them.  Originally these were for annotating source code with compile errors:

My markers can also introduce widgets into the text, such as this color swatch; in which case the text flows around them and they are effectively invisible to edit operations on the text.