[tthisk]

There are editors that allow you to edit the abstract syntax tree (AST) directly. An AST is the parsed representation of your code without information about its presentation (e.g. spaces or tabs). Code can be presented in different formats for each programmer, since the formatting is part of the presentation but not the storage. The downside of these editors is that it looks like you are editing text, but actually the text doesn't really exist in memory, since the text is just a projection. Such editors are called 'projectional' editors, JetBrains has an implementation called MPS.