Capturing and analyzing low-level events from the code editor

Abstract

In this paper, we present FLUORITE, a publicly available event logging plug-in for Eclipse which captures all of the low-level events when using the Eclipse code editor. FLUORITE captures not only what types of events occurred in the code editor, but also more detailed information such as the inserted and deleted text and the specific parameters for each command. This enables the detection of many usage patterns that could otherwise not be recognized, such as "typo correction" that requires knowing that the entered text is immediately deleted and replaced. Moreover, the snapshots of each source code file that has been opened during the session can be completely reproduced using the collected information. We also provide analysis and visualization tools which report various statistics about usage patterns, and we provide the logs in an XML format so others can write their own analyzers. FLUORITE can be used for not only evaluating existing tools, but also for discovering issues that motivate new tools.