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oerstedyesterday at 5:15 PM2 repliesview on HN

Man, it's such a shame that you pivoted away from the canvas-based editor concept, it was such a pleasure to use, it's so much better than tabs.

https://github.com/haystackeditor/haystack-editor

It's still probably the best tool to navigate, visualize and understand complex codebases, which is particularly important now with AI coded repos. I keep looking for alternatives but they are all notably worse.

About a month ago I spent a few frustrating hours building it from source for my system and making it work, and I've enjoyed using it as my main IDE since.

I wish I had the time to make a fork and bring in a newer version of VSCode. If anyone takes it up I might help at least.


Replies

akshaysgyesterday at 5:27 PM

Yeah I agree it's a shame. Unfortunately coding has changed fast and I was not confident that the editor was in the correct direction with AI coding becoming so prevalent.

I think there is a lot of value with "reconnecting" with your codebase, so I do have some plans to bring the core concept of Haystack back in one form or another.

visekryesterday at 7:13 PM

100% - tried forking VSCode too, scratched it. Way too much work to restyle, and I started wondering if IDEs should even be code-focused anymore. Built https://getmesa.dev instead, a canvas-based IDE for Claude Code & other CLI Agents. Kinda stuck on direction though - lmk if you've got ideas or wanna help out : )

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