What tool/application/whatever do you wish existed?

Question

This may sound like a but of a fluff question, but I think it can be of some use. Often I've seen people, both on SO and off, say that they want to contribute or work on a project of some sort, but they don't know what or how. Most of the time, the response is to "find an open source project" or "just do something they find interesting". I think it would be awesome if we could come up some better answers. So the question is, what do you, the SO community, a group of developers, hackers and programmers, think would be interesting or cool? Some open-source project that has fallen by the wayside? Something new?

Ideally, this question might push somebody to implement or take on one of these projects. If nothing else, this might serve as an interesting gauge of which projects developers are really interested in.

Answer 1

Personally, I really wish that there was the equivalent of tortoiseSVN for git. The only step in that direction seems to be the git-cheetah project, but it hasn't been worked on in months and is currently in the "nothing really works" phase.

Answer 2

I'd like a tool that worked inside Eclipse or netbeans, and whenever a wizard executes will show you the equivalent commands executed to get the same effect from the command line

Answer 3

I would like something along the lines of DOSbox, but for emulating apps written for Windows 95/98. There's so much software ephemera out there that's been abandoned that is worth a second look, if only for historical and nostalgic purposes. Games, to be more to the point.

Answer 4

For ages I have wistfully imagined a programming syntax aware "meta"-text editor.

Basically instead of storing your source as raw text it would store it in a parsed and tokenized form, where things like variables were detected as being variables, functions were stored as functions etc. with enough context information to be able to determine scope and a whole bunch of other neat stuff.

You'd be able to rename variables throughout your source tree with 100% accuracy by merely changing name of the token that had been saved. You'd be able to end the wars that break out when two people from different sides of the "one true bracing style" fence spoke to each other. If done right it could even swap between languages for you by changing the semantics.

Think of the peace and harmony that it would bring to the world!

(edit) It seems this is an idea shared by others. See SCID for a wishlist.

Answer 5

I would like to have a flat filesystem where tags instead of directories are used to keep files in order. This should include the system-wide file open/save dialogs as well as a descent standalone browser to find, view and manipulate files.

Answer 6

I'd like a tool that manipulates groups of related services in windows, so I could turn on my mysql / tomcat / apache set and turn off my IIS / ASP.NET / SQL Server set all at once.