I second this. Instead of blowing up the IDE, it is better to rely on external tools like VSCode. My workflow anyway. Language Server capability for NetLogo syntax highlighting, possibly a linter would be great and feasible in VSCode. Please link existing efforts if there are any.
The major showstopper for now is the reloading of code. It would be great if there was an (experimental) option in NetLogo IDE to auto-reload changed .nlogo and .nls files if they are already open in the IDE. Then changes from an external editor would be reflected in the Netlogo Model.
This is dangerous of course as people may mess with the special section headers or the graphical elements. Long-term improvement of the .nlogo format (e.g. representing it as a .json object) might be a distant future side-effect.
Autoloading would improve my coding (happening in VSCode) significantly!