Towards an Empirically-Based IDE: An Analysis of Code Size and Screen Space
Adam C. Short, Austin Zachary Henley · 2019
Integrated development environments (IDEs) are ubiquitous in software development. Despite their popularity, much of their designs are not based on empirical findings and have been virtually unchanged since their inception. More recently, researchers have proposed alternative IDE designs based on observational studies of developers and found promising benefits. However, many design decisions are still unsupported by empirical evidence. Towards designing an empirically-driven IDE, we performed an analysis on code size and screen space. First, we analyzed the size of code from 95 projects in 4 programming languages. Second, we calculated how much code can fit onscreen using various document arrangements in VS Code with common screen resolutions. We found (1) the length of code depends on the programming language, while the width of code is similar across languages and (2) the amount of code onscreen can be substantially increased by properly configuring the IDE and by using a high-resolution monitor.