- Thanks to formatters like gofmt and prettier when I edit code I can do so with exactly zero concern for spacing, new lines, alignment, indent, etc. Close to structure editors where, in my understanding, the way code is stored and the way it is presented may be completely independent.
- Mass-renaming like what is provided by LSPs and other refactoring tools also go in this direction of thinking about symbols and their identity, rather than their text name.
- Tree-sitter lets traditionally text-oriented tools be re-created to be structure-aware, for example difftastic for diffs or ast-grep for structured search-and-replace.
I didn’t quite understand how the structure editor shown here works with types though, and though I’d love to edit my Typescript in a structure editor that just couldn’t work if my inputs got delayed by the Typescript type system figuring things out. I would take enforced type correctness if it can be instant, but I’d still use structure editing without type awareness.