ast based text editor

howdy /prog/

Is there a text editor that is based on editing the code as a syntax tree, rather than as a file separated into lines of text? So rather than going from line to line, you could go from expression to expression, or from statement to statement, or function definition to function definition? I'm looking for something like vi where you have a ton of short key board commands, but they would operate on a syntax tree rather than text, lines, and words.

Emacs has it's sexp commands¹ and of course paredit².

¹ https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Expressions.html
² http://mumble.net/~campbell/emacs/paredit.el

>>2
Emacs is shit. It requires reading over 9000 pages manual to actually do anything.

>>3
Not really. You can just look up only the things that interest you. I don't know plenty of Emacs internals, yet it was usable in less than a day of learning, but completely comfortable after about 3-4 days of actually using/tweaking my .emacs.