Envision: A Fast and Flexible Visual Code Editor with Fluid Interactions
Dimitar Asenov, Péter Müller · Repository for Publications and Research Data (ETH Zurich) · 2014
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. Keywords—programming environments, structured editors, vi-sual programming, human-computer interaction I.