I see that a Shader Editor has been on your roadmap for some time now.
I would, respectfully, like to suggest that you move it to a higher priority.
Through the little experience I've had so far in putting together a custom shader, its a real pain in the arse!
The whole idea, surely, is to make it easier for a person whose had at least a small amount of HLSL coding experience.
Why should one have to wade backwards and forwards trying to sort through all the EE shader code in its unusually weird format?

For instance, providing the simple equivalents of the accepted HLSL global essentials:

ModelWorld : world matrix
ModelViewMatrix : model view matrix
ModelViewProj : view projection matrix
ModelViewIT : view inverse transform matrix

and texture samplers, for example:

sampler HMapSampler = sampler_state
{
Texture = <HMap>;
MinFilter = LINEAR;
MagFilter = LINEAR;
MipFilter = LINEAR;
AddressU = WRAP;
AddressV = WRAP;
};

samplerCUBE sky = sampler_state
{
Texture = <EnvironmentMap>;
MipFilter = NONE;
MinFilter = LINEAR;
MagFilter = LINEAR;
AddressU = WRAP;
AddressV = WRAP;
AddressW = WRAP;

};

sampler fresnel = sampler_state
{
Texture = <FresnelMap>;
MipFilter = NONE;
MinFilter = LINEAR;
MagFilter = LINEAR;
AddressU = CLAMP;
AddressV = CLAMP;
};

sampler reflmap = sampler_state
{
Texture = <Reflectionmap>;
MipFilter = LINEAR;
MinFilter = LINEAR;
MagFilter = LINEAR;
AddressU = CLAMP;
AddressV = CLAMP;

};

sampler refrmap = sampler_state
{
Texture = <Refractionmap>;
MipFilter = LINEAR;
MinFilter = LINEAR;
MagFilter = LINEAR;
AddressU = CLAMP;
AddressV = CLAMP;

};

And the means to access them, for example:

Vec4 color = tex2D(HMapSampler,vtx.tex())
Vec4 reflColor = texCUBE(EnvMapSampler,Vec4(reflVect.x, reflVect.y, reflVect.z, 1.0))

There's nothing weird with EE shader codes format, that's regular HLSL with extra macros that allow you to write shader once, but compile it for all platforms (Shader Model 2, 3, 4, 5, and GL compatible version).
Yes I'd like a shader editor too, but that's a big task and I would need some funds to cover its development.
Thanks

Well that's a straight answer. I guess I just battle on then.
I understand that regular HLSL is used... the weird and troubling part for me is stepping through all those macros to get to it.