I mean, stuff like “double click on .protobuff file and it opens in notepad and looks like json or whatever. When you click save it gets serialized back to protobuff.
For example, in the wire-format, a string and a sub-message are encoded as the same type (a blob - varint + sequence of bytes), but using the schema they are clearly interpreted differently.
Sure, it is possible to make a self-describing protobuf message which includes the schema in protobuf representation, but that is a special-case.
The slightly dirty solution is https://www.schemastore.org/json/, where the IDE looks up schema from a global registry, using a fileMatch pattern.
Here's a short comparison of serializing formats: https://drewdevault.com/2020/06/21/BARE-message-encoding.htm...
Yes, strings, bytes, and substructures all appear in the same in the wire format. Just like strings, bytes, and dates all appear the same in JSON. If you're trying to write a generic protobuf viewer like wodenokoto suggests, you can make reasonable assumptions about the contents 99% of the time based on the data, and show the user multiple options if you're not sure. There are already lots of tools that do this, but none very well integrated into mainstream development workflows.