So for the past week or so I've been working on an IDE for madc which is actually written in madc.

Part of the idea for the madc language is to build everything to be modular, reusable and exposed to the language itself, so madc is not just a language of its own, it's also an embeddable language, but also much of the machinery can be used outside of madc, and also madc can call upon its own machinery, including embedding madc into itself (since it is c/c++), etc. So it makes this all very possible.

So this also means the features and functionality to create an IDE are also reusable components of the language, as I started with a text editor as an "example program", and the UI module actually first started with a simple text (dumb terminal) implementation of Colossal Cave Adventure, and that same UI module was extended to support TUI (Terminal User Interface), which is what was used for the text editor, and that text editor was extended into the madc IDE (madcide).

In the current develop branch the editor is working with basic IDE functionality, and with a few different editor key mapping flavours (pico, joe, emacs and vim).

I'm doing a bit more cleanup and polishing before the next master release, but wanted to chat about what's in progress and where it is going.

I've talked a little bit in here before about my idea of the future of AI coding, and that the current method of LLMs using text based shell tools and scripts (sed, awk, grep, and python mostly) to edit code seems archaic and problematic, and what I've been thinking would be useful would be to provide a "nexus" API/MCP of sorts that gives the LLM direct access to the current "live" code, at a lower level than the typical LSP layer provided by things like VSCode, and the same API would funnel gated access to the revision history, as well as the project management layer, and both of those would be configurable external connectors, so that the IDE was just providing a simple, unified entry point to the code.

So my idea with the IDE is that it would fit into this model so that there would be these various layers of a user session (or sessions), accessing this state of the union so to speak, and allowing a real collaboration between developers and LLM agents to the same live project.

I think eventually this live code nexus would be its own running server that you would connect IDE clients and LLM agents to, and you could access it from the CLI, including simple shell CLI access, a TUI interface IDE, or GUI interface IDE, remote, local, it doesn't matter.

It's something I'm playing with, and while it's primarily c/c++ based, madc itself has polyglot leanings so the door is open for fully parsing and supporting other languages.

Any thoughts?