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Danilo Woznica, Apr 16, 2021 2 min read

A React code editor

Have we already exhausted the possibilities of how we interact with our favorite code editor? Have we got so used to how we code to achieve a certain goal we can no longer see any way to involve it?

Since I started to work at CodeSandbox, I’ve seen myself facing those issues more often. Besides that, I began to wonder how beginners are struggling to rule the code editor and learn their favorite framework simultaneously.

Therefore, I challenged myself to come up with a code editor/IDE for beginner developers focused on ReactJS and what this concept might look like.

The anatomy of a component

The first concept came to me some time ago, when I was teaching a friend of mine more about React and how a component works. I remember I said the component itself has a proper “anatomy”. Later, I realized it makes a lot of sense because we know where things are supposed to be in a component.

In other words:

Anatomy of a component

So basically, we can predict what actions the user might take and teach them the best practices. So, this idea evolved to a new concept which are menus with context-sensitive intentions linked to those sectors.

The whole point of this concept is that we can understand the code to provide a way to make a new code editor with whatever framework or even language we want. I just used React to illustrate the idea.

Danilo Woznica