PescaJ: A projectional editor for Java featuring scattered code aggregation

Abstract

Conventionally, source code (and its documentation) is simultaneously a storage and editing representation, through files and editors to manipulate them as text. Over the years, IDEs have become increasingly sophisticated, providing features to augment the visible text content with helpful information (e.g., overlay documentation popups, inlay type hints), or on the opposite, to decrease it to reduce clutter (e.g., code folds on imports, documentation, methods, etc). This is a sign that the developers seek more convenient code editing forms than the direct manipulation of text files. We present PescaJ, a prototype projectional editor for Java projects that breaks away from file-oriented source code editing, providing the possibility of forming views that aggregate methods that belong to different classes, where single methods may be simultaneously present and edited in multiple views. Furthermore, we provide documentation editors, also aggregating scattered Javadoc comments, that can be used in parallel with source code editing.