Code Editing Improvements in WordPress 4.9

The themes outlined for WordPress 4.9 are “editing code, managing plugins and themes, a user-centric way to customize a site, and polishing some recently added features over this last year.” Within the themes of editing code and polishing recent features, we’re improving the code editing functionality in the Customizer’s Additional CSS feature, the Custom HTML widget, and the Plugin and Theme file editors. We included these improvements to code editing among the 4.9 goals and this release is packed with them. CodeMirror: Syntax Highlighting, Linting, and Auto-completion
The most visible and drastic improvement to code editing in 4.9 is that there is now an actual code editing control rather than just a textarea input. If you’ve been using WordPress for a long time (over 8 years), this may sound like déjà vu. Syntax highlighting for the theme and plugin editors was originally introduced in WordPress 2.8 (#9173) but it was removed shortly after in 2.8.1 due to browser compatibility problems with the “CodePress” library (no relation to WordPress). So in the 8 years since the feature was re-proposed in #12423, after considering a slew
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/16354/code-editing-improvements-in-wordpress-4-9

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2017/10/22/code-editing-improvements-in-wordpress-4-9/