Now that is interesting! I wish we could leave the text age for programming already. This doesn't seem to be that (it very much claims to be a text editor), but maybe people working on semantic enhancements for program editing can learn something here.
Since you specifically articulated it using those words, I'll point you to BlockStudio, which is a new programming paradigm (an extension of Graphical Rewrite Rules).
Yes, I designed and implemented it, so I'm biased, but I believe it's one path that breaks away from our current text-centric approach to coding.
> select syntax tree nodes instead of plain text
Now that is interesting! I wish we could leave the text age for programming already. This doesn't seem to be that (it very much claims to be a text editor), but maybe people working on semantic enhancements for program editing can learn something here.