[chriswarbo]

Keep in mind that it's pretty trivial (if laborious) to make parsers/pretty-printers between your language of choice and s-expressions, which would allow a generic tree editor to work on your language.

Note that you don't need a fleshed-out, implementation-friendly abstract syntax tree (e.g. "(definition (name foo) (type (function int int)) (arguments ((name x) (type int))) (body ...))"); you just need a parse tree of the tokens (e.g. (def foo ((int x)) ...)).

I agree that the existing silos of VisualStudio, Eclipse, Netbeans, jEdit, Emacs, Vi, etc. is a bad thing, and initiatives like LSP are is a step in the right direction.

Another nice approach that I came across recently is https://github.com/CarlOlson/structured-editing . This also uses a separate process to get information about code, but uses "spans" (start position, end position, label, extra info) which seem to be in between strings and syntax trees. For example a span might encompass a class definition; another span covers a method inside that class; another covers a statement in that method; another covers a function call in that statement; another covers the function name in that call, and it's extra info includes the location where that function is defined, its type, etc.