roc/design/editor/requirements.md

The Editor Must

• Edit roc code
• Run plugins asynchronously. Plugins can be standalone or come with roc packages.

The Editor Should

• Support beginner-friendly projectional editing.
• Support typed holes.
• Support temporarily switching to free/legacy editing for operations that are difficult in projectional mode.
• Allow everyone to write, publish and test plugins.
• Disregard optional whitespace; there should be only one way to format roc.
• Provide useful debug UI and relevant data about the state of values.
• Allow running tests and viewing test results.
• Search and view documentation.
• Apply and render basic editing operations in 8.3 ms.
• Be the most popular roc editor.
• Be bundled with the roc CLI/compiler.
• Help find answers to all questions you would normally google.
• Accommodate those with disabilities better than other popular editors.
• Provide key familiar features: autocomplete, go to def, find references, rename, show type...
• Be able to execute core functionality with keyboard, with the exception of plugin functionality.
• Allow for output and errors that are nicer to read and search through compared to terminal output.
• Have an integrated REPL.
• Allow measuring performance of running roc apps.
• Show which code is covered by tests.
• Support several chart types, ability to transform data coming from logs, output, and intermediary values (from roc program execution).
• Support easily generating tests for a function.
• Indicate progress for slower operations.
• Provide assistance when upgrading roc/libs to new versions.
• Make it easy for the user to provide feedback/report problems.
• Provide tutorials for people with different amounts of programming experience.
• Provide useful cheat sheets.
• Accommodate those new to functional programming.
• Allow viewing editor, library, platform… release notes.
• Support roc notebooks similar to Jupyter.
• Support publishing and searching notebooks.
• Encourage making your code transparent and having a meaningful visual overview.

The Editor Might

• Warn the user for code patterns that can be written to run significantly faster.
• Support publishing of roc libraries from the editor.
• Support conversion for snippets of code from different languages to roc.
• Support running in the browser.
• Support code execution on a remote machine while being able to view UI locally.
• Allow detailed logging so you can see everything you were doing(including plugin actions) when you were for example editing a specific file 3 months ago.
• Support entering a parseable formatted piece of roc code character by character so that the rendered result in the editor looks exactly like the input. This could make working with a projectional editor more intuitive.