Naive question — why aren’t Swing-based IDE-like tools that could be editor agnostic (things like inspector are an example) more common?

Background — it seems like Seesaw makes creating cross-platform GUIs kinda straightforward, and of course you can launch those from the REPL as needed — so imagine things like introspecting a namespace/vars/atoms, configurations etc. So some of the functionality that something like e.g. CIDER provides could be also provided in other editors “for free”. I realize it’s a lot of work, and I’m wondering if this approach has some other inherent flaws…

I think most people just like having stuff integrated into their editor

I think an inspector is a good target for an external UI.

Some of the problem is network bound.

oh I agree, now that I think about it I'd love something like this

I find it hard to live without the binaryage/devtools extensions in cljs, for example

Stuart Halloway actually asked for this in his repl driven development talk.