I was staring at my code thinking how boring the text looks. All I see is text, with no visualizable structure.
Visualizable structures would be awesome:
- Background graphics such as 3D half-pipes on edge connecting the opening and closing brackets of loop scopes, nested in 3D to show how deep the loops are nested.
- Wires with arrows along them showing where a goto statement points, with a code section highlight (or preview if out of viewport) of the target label.
- Conditional blocks could be rendered to show the "true" code in a positive color and the "false" code in a negative color, and mousing over the background at the left edge could reveal a preview of the condition statement for that block (appended with "== true" or "== false" depending on the code context).
- Icons for Types, that show up in front of variable names so you know what type they are.
- Change the background of the method, displaying tiled locks or keys, depending on whether you type public or private in front of the method (a nice indicator of the default if you fail to specify either).
Is there anything out there that illustrates code like this?
I don't mean analytically generated graphics representing the code or algorthmic structure in some way. Rather, I mean something that actually illustrates the editable code in place.