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Discussion on: What developer products/tools should exist, but don't?

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isaacdlyman profile image
Isaac Lyman • Edited

Better code comments
An IDE integration that prompts you to describe what a method/class/field does, then prompts you to update it whenever you commit a change to that code. Comments are stored in the cloud, not the code repo, and accessible from a web interface (with version history). For open source code, the web interface should be part of the documentation.

Finer-grained version control history
Right click a line of code. Choose "See line history." See a one-page list of every time that line of code has changed, with a commit hash and link for the responsible commit and any relevant PRs.

Big red lever
I want a (physical) big red lever that I can configure with autohotkey or a similar tool so that every time I pull it, it runs git push. Would this make my life easier? No. But would it make me unreasonably happy? Yes.

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hotfusionman profile image
Al Chou

It looks like two separate plugins for Jetbrains IDE's sort of cover the gist of your comments wishlist (I haven't tried these, I'm just reporting what their blurbs say): "The Better Comments plugin will help you create more human-friendly comments in your code.…" and "[Code comments plugin lets you] Add comments to code of project without change (sic) it."

RubyMine, and presumably all the Jetbrains IDE's, can show version control history for the selected lines (I haven't tried, and doubt would work, selecting a substring of a single line and asking for its history). That view gives a Git commit hash (I don't know what it does for other VCS's, as I don't use them). Linking to the commit and PR's isn't built in. Maybe somebody wrote a plugin for that.