[em-bee]

the question i am interested in is "what is your vision?". what problem are you trying to solve?

you mention "spatial relationships of directories, files, and colocation to help generate mental mappings of a code space" which i guess is the ability to zoom out and get a visual representation of the relationship as opposed to just looking at a directory tree. that makes sense. i have seen different attempts at doing that, some better than others. to make that practical however i guess it would help to be able to edit text in that space too. zoom in to one column, allow scrolling to jump from one column to the next. and then parse the code, add highlighting, connect function calls. imagine zooming out from a selected function and suddenly you get arrows from all over the codebase where that function is referenced to visualize the relationship.

as far as the proof of concept goes it shows that there are no performance issues this way (at least as far my brief test has shown), now the next step is probably to make it work practically. and for that i guess the key feature is to quickly jump around in the code.

i hope this is useful. i am less interested in IDEs myself so i looked just out of curiosity. my primary interest is in a more powerful commandline tool/terminal that can visualize files and data.