One problem I'm always wrestling with while programming is how to see as much as possible of my program on screen at once. I tend to use a very high screen resolution (1600x1200 usually) and a very small font in my text editor (6x8) to see a large quantity of text at once. My coworkers despair that they can never read what's on my screen and say that I must have very good eyesight (I do at short distance - reading road signs while driving is another matter). But even 150 lines is not enough sometimes.
A while ago I had an idea for effectively increasing the number of lines even further. Vertically "compress" the lines that are further away from the cursor, while showing the closer lines at normal size. The further lines wouldn't be legible (unless the document is quite small) but you can see the overall "shape" of the document and easily navigate to different sections. The effect would be kind of like squashing the document vertically so that the whole thing fits on the screen and then looking at part of it with a horizontal bar magnifier centred on the cursor (although it would be a magnifier with an extended cross section so that even lines of text quite far away from the center were magnified a little bit, and there would be no obvious boundary between magnified and non-magnified text). Because of the similarity to a bar magnifier, and by analogy with the concept of a "folding editor" I call this idea the "lensing editor".
[...] Lensing editor [...]