I love new programming toys and this week is a good one for those. Ever since I laid the foundations for Dehydra I’ve been dreaming of a world where I can quickly lookup a piece of code(say something that someone complains about on IRC), fix it, get it reviewed and pushed in the most efficient manner possible. Seems that the pieces are finally falling into place.

1. I want quick semantically aware code lookup via DXR. And guess what, there is progress in that direction.
2. I want to DXR to provide a link to edit the code. Bespin looks like the most promising candidate for editing. As an aside, using canvas to do text editing is badass. I salute devs who are crazy enough to prove their point by reimplementing something (hopefully better) from scratch using an approach that hasn’t been tried before.
3. I want my changes to be saved as a diff into bugzilla. I want that to be two way so I can edit existing patches and save them as new bugzilla attachments.
4. From there I’d like a commit feature in bugzilla so the patch would go through try-then-push cycle that Jesse described.
5. Having all this inplace would make it trivial to integrate random features such as crash stack trace navigation or Pork automagic refactoring. Now I’m sure that most of us would still run Emacs and other desktop editors for longer development tasks. But just imagine being bored with a computer at a webcafe, boring friend, etc and having the ability to quickly jump into in the development process as easily as logging into webmail.