[kaba0]

I don’t know, in my opinion an advanced IDE is sort of that - I don’t think of IntelliJ’s text as notepad’s - it is more an AST in textual form as per the language’s grammar.

My human brain is very fast at parsing that to a tree based on visual cues, while the program does the same constantly - syntax highlighting is important exactly for this reason, if it is colorful, it parsed correctly, that’s the feedback between machine and human.

Even manipulations are AST-level, I expand the selection based on that, etc. It just has a very fast, “invisible” node-edit mode where you can just type a few characters to change the function node’s name.