Design requirements for more flexible structured editors from a study of programmers' text editing

A detailed study of Java programmers' text editing found that the full flexibility of unstructured text was not utilized for the vast majority of programmers' character-level edits. Rather, programmers used a small set of editing patterns to achieve their modifications, which accounted for all of the edits observed in the study. About two-thirds of the edits were of name and list structures and most edits preserved structure except for temporary omissions of delimiters. These findings inform the design of a new class of more flexible structured program editors that may avoid well-known usability problems of traditional structured editors, while providing more sophisticated support such as more universal code completion and smarter copy and paste. Author Keywords Structured editors, interaction techniques. ACM Classification D.2.6. Programming environments; H.5.2 User Interfaces.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Andrew Jensen Ko, Htet Htet Aung, Brad A. Myers
• Keywords: CHI 2005, Edits Preserved Structure, Human Computer Interaction, Keywords Structured Editors, Traditional Structured Editors