Envision: A Fast and Flexible Visual Code Editor with Fluid Interactions

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.