Hop 2.17 Explorer direction: keep it simple or move toward a more IDE-like experience (line numbers, themes, icons, markdown, syntax highlighting)

[CarlosJuncher03]

In Apache Hop 2.17, the UI improvements—especially the updated Explorer / file search & navigation experience—are a big step forward. My team loved it: organizing pipelines using folders/subfolders (mappings, subpipelines, etc.) feels much more natural now and has noticeably improved our daily workflow.

My question is about the intended direction for this area:

Is the goal to keep the Explorer simple, focused on browsing and basic file opening (Explorer-like), or

Is there an intention to evolve it into a more complete experience, closer to an editor/IDE (VS Code-like) for auxiliary files?

Context
In many projects, besides Hop files, we need to work with other artifacts that are part of the pipeline, such as .sql, .py, .json, .md, config files, etc. Today we typically have to open a separate IDE (we use VS Code) to edit those.

Optional enhancement ideas
These are not critical features, but they could add real value and be a nice differentiator—if aligned with the roadmap:

Show line numbers

Support themes (light/dark) and UI consistency

Improve/extend icons per file type

Syntax highlighting for common types (SQL, Python, JSON, Java, etc.)

Markdown preview/rendering

Detect file types by extension and open with the appropriate editor

Question
Is there an official direction (or ongoing discussion) regarding how far the Hop Explorer/Editor should go?
If the vision is to keep it simple, that’s totally fine—but if there’s room to evolve it, I’d be happy to open separate issues for incremental improvements (line numbers, themes, markdown, highlighting, etc.) based on what makes sense for the project.

Note
Congrats to the team—this area is genuinely better. We’ve seen clear productivity gains, especially because we apply a software-engineering style organization to our pipelines (folders/subfolders by domain and responsibility).

Just to recall, the screen is very good, this would be like a small interface adjustment that would make it easier to adopt a single tool for minor edits in other files

[bamaer]

I agree this would be helpful. The idea is to let Hop Gui evolve more and more into an IDE.
However, there's a lot of work to do in Hop, and even though all of the changes you suggest are manageable in themselves, it all requires work and time that can't be spent on other tasks.
So, in short, this would definitely be useful and add value. Some of these things will probably start to appear, but will gradually trickle in rather than all at once in a single release.