How important is VED to the future of Poplog? This would remove the need for learning VED to use Poplog.

That's a great question. VED is a great tool and I have very much missed it over the years. However, plenty of people have objected to having to learn a new editor rather than work in their own ecosystem.

Emacs users did put together their own major mode. But I don't know where that is, so I have added a task to track the CONTRIB files down. And doing integration with VS Code strikes me as a fairly sensible idea too.

Assuming that we are talking about an alternative to VED rather than removing VED entirely (because that is much easier in terms of re-writing tutorials), then I think the idea to switching to (say) VS Code or Eclipse as an alternative basis for an IDE is viable. It's quite a lot of work to develop a practical experience. There are a bunch of features that need covering: immediate mode (REPL in the editor) for the different subsystemsManage a persistent Poplog process for compiling/interpreting code compile the local unit or file using the correct subsystem into the persistent process select the local unit (line-based) shortcut help/Teach/Ref/Showlib on topic, contextualized by the appropriate subsystem

I think that list covers the essentials. I guess that list would need some careful review.

As to whether or not VED could reasonably be removed from Poplog is a good question. My own opinion is that the conversion of VED to use X-windows (XVED), is so terrible that it is a misery to use. The root cause of the problem is that XVED uses a top-level window for every file buffer. In a typical session I could easily have 30-40 windows open and, no surprise, that makes my entire desktop unusable. Under Linux, you need to devote a workspace to each Poplog session - madness by design. So I think there's a lot of motivation to find a different way of programming with Poplog.