You're right: The tooling ecosystem for text-based programming is already very mature, which is why I wouldn't want to replace it. Current programming languages

You're right: The tooling ecosystem for text-based programming is already very mature, which is why I wouldn't want to replace it. Current programming languages are stored as text anyway (trying to replace an entire established ecosystem without any steps in between doesn't really work, see Microsoft's constant failures attempting to bundle new things). That's why my imaginary editor would work with that format, just in a more semantic/graphical way - as an enhancement rather than a totally new way of doing things. In fact the most practical way to go about it (let's work within the current ecosystem as much as possible!) would probably be to make a VSCode extension.