[idan]

When video terminals first came out, everyone started out using line editors even though line editors make no sense when you can display arbitrary buffer. It took a while until editors changed to be "screen native". But they did change, meaningfully.

When GUIs first came out, editors were just "terminal editors in a window". Took a while for the modern concept of an IDE to happen, with hovers, red squigglies, sidebars, jump to definition. All of that was possible on the first day of the GUI editor! But it took a while to figure out what everyone wanted it to be.

I think we're at a similar inflection point. Yeah, everyone today (myself included) is comfortable in the environment we know. VS Code is lovely. And AI (plus realtime multiplayer) is not a display technology. But I think it's a material technology shift in the same vein as those two moments in history. I would not bet that the next thirty years is going to continue look like today's VS Code. I don't know to say what it WILL look like — we have to keep prototyping to find out.

[Protostome]

I mostly agree with all of your points. But IMHO, if (and that's a big if nowadays, with modern web and mobile dev) text editing is the core task of the app your'e using as your IDE, then all the graphics are just redundant. All the highlighting, hovers / etc can be done via much simpler graphics that is memory and CPU efficient. As a dev, I would like to IDE developers to invest in core functionality, rather than a fancy GUI.

Take the electron IDE for example. It embeds the chrome runtime which is a total waste, given that i just want to edit some text files.