Envision
A Fast and Flexible Visual Code Editor with Fluid Interactions
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Author / Producer
Date
2014
Publication Type
Report
ETH Bibliography
yes
Citations
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OPEN ACCESS
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Rights / License
Abstract
While visual programming has had success in some areas such as introductory or domain specific programming, professional developers typically still use a text editor. Designing a visual tool for professionals poses a number of challenges: visualizations must be flexible to support a variety of different tasks, interactions must be fluid to retain productivity, and the visual editing must scale to large software projects. In this paper we introduce Envision, a visual structured code editor that addresses these challenges using an architecture that supports flexible, customizable visualizations, keyboard-centric controls for fluid interaction, and optimizations to ensure good performance for large projects. Experiments with CogTool indicate that En- vision’s code manipulation techniques are as efficient as those of Eclipse, thus overcoming a major usability barrier for visual programming for professional developers.
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Publication status
published
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Book title
Journal / series
Volume
Pages / Article No.
Publisher
ETH-Zürich
Event
Edition / version
Methods
Software
Geographic location
Date collected
Date created
Subject
Vi- sual programming; PROGRAMMEDITOREN (SOFTWAREPRODUKTE); Programming environments; PROGRAM EDITORS (SOFTWARE PRODUCTS); VISUAL PROGRAMMING (PROGRAMMING METHODS); VISUELLE PROGRAMMIERUNG (PROGRAMMIERMETHODEN); Human-computer interaction; Structured editors
Organisational unit
03653 - Müller, Peter / Müller, Peter
02150 - Dep. Informatik / Dep. of Computer Science