CodeRibbon: More Efficient Workspace Management and Navigation for Mainstream Development Environments

Abstract

Developers spend considerable time navigating and managing open code documents in their development environment. Researchers have proposed novel interfaces to address the problems of workspace management, such as the Patchworks and Code Bubbles code editors, which replace the traditional tabbed document interface. However, these interfaces are not available in mainstream development environments despite their promising laboratory results. In this paper, we demonstrate CodeRibbon, a user interface for more efficient workspace management and navigation that is publicly available as a code editor plugin. CodeRibbon provides a virtually endless ribbon of code documents that are arranged in an adjustable grid for efficient juxtaposition and navigation with minimal document management. Our implementation is open source and currently in development as plugins for Atom and VS Code. Since prior research on these interfaces has been limited to laboratory studies, we aim to collect usage data from a longitudinal field study involving professional developers engaged in real-world tasks. This work should provide a better understanding of how tools can support developers in efficiently managing their development environments. Demonstration video: https://youtu.be/m5wQ87ItVGg