Ask HN: If building an IDE from scratch, what features would you add?

2•rajasimon•1y ago

Many IDEs feel bloated or outdated. If you could design one from scratch, what would you keep, drop, or reinvent?

Comments

T0V1•1y ago

I'd keep all the features from neovim, remove all the features from every other IDE.

joegibbs•1y ago

Native vector search would be great. I was just thinking today how irritating it is to try to find some specific component in a very large codebase without knowing exactly what it’s called already.

SvenL•1y ago

Great debugging capabilities, time travel debugging, data break points, attach to running processes, remote debugging etc.

I think the most important feature for an IDE is debugging - at least this is the feature which separates an ide from just a Text Editor

pancsta•1y ago

You mean like Zed? Check their roadmap.

Isaac Levy auctioning off his mind

Pigeon-powered internet packet goes under the hammer at Christie's

It's important that we don't concede FOSS to socialists and communists

Fields Medalists Are Wrong

Tailwind CSS v4 Dynamic Themes with CSS Variables

New EU Rules: Smartphones and Tablets to Meet Ecodesign Requirements by June

Rice husk is being repurposed as a sturdy and resilient construction material

What are wormholes? An astrophysicist explains the shortcuts through space-time

Show HN: Henge Days – When does sunlight directly hit the wall of a building?

The Great Experiment

The Job Trail: Oregon Trail, but you're job hunting in 2026

Drop in Russian bot traffic after Yandex drone strikes was mostly web crawlers

The People, Counted: Browse Raw Census Records at the Internet Archive

A man hiking the world in search of rare cheeses

Normies won't know they're building software because their AI will do it

The Kubernetes Control Loop Changed the Question

AI coding agents generate more code, but not more software

Written in Go

The Download: moon city problems and drone traffic controllers

Forkable copy-on-write filesystem on gVisor sandboxes

Is Growth Good?

Ask HN: How does your organization make build vs. buy decisions now?

Aura: A behavioral threat-intelligence framework for AI Safety

Lotus Improv on the NeXT

AI Reflections of a New Grad Engineer

Feds Got Warrants to Use Fake Cell Towers to Hunt Down Don Lemon's Producer

A Nigerian breakfast reveals centuries of history and today's struggle to get by

Who's Who at Jane Street

I Did Not Leave Nazi Germany in Time (1982)

Lonely Reality of Self Hosting