Visual augmentation of source code editors: A systematic mapping study

TL;DR

This systematic mapping study reviews 103 articles on visual augmentations in source code editors, categorizing tools and approaches over twenty years, and provides a taxonomy and historical overview of the field.

Contribution

It offers the first comprehensive taxonomy and overview of source code editor augmentation tools and approaches, based on an extensive review of literature from the past twenty years.

Findings

Identified 103 relevant articles on source code editor augmentation.

Developed a taxonomy with seven dimensions for categorizing augmentation tools.

Provided historical context and current industrial practices in code editor augmentation.

Abstract

Source code written in textual programming languages is typically edited in integrated development environments or specialized code editors. These tools often display various visual items, such as icons, color highlights or more advanced graphical overlays directly in the main editable source code view. We call such visualizations source code editor augmentation. In this paper, we present a first systematic mapping study of source code editor augmentation tools and approaches. We manually reviewed the metadata of 5,553 articles published during the last twenty years in two phases -- keyword search and references search. The result is a list of 103 relevant articles and a taxonomy of source code editor augmentation tools with seven dimensions, which we used to categorize the resulting list of the surveyed articles. We also provide the definition of the term source code editor augmentation, along with a brief overview of historical development and augmentations available in current industrial IDEs.