{"id":154510,"date":"2006-09-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-09-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/msr-research-item\/code-thumbnails-using-spatial-memory-to-navigate-source-code\/"},"modified":"2018-10-16T20:56:18","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T03:56:18","slug":"code-thumbnails-using-spatial-memory-to-navigate-source-code","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/code-thumbnails-using-spatial-memory-to-navigate-source-code\/","title":{"rendered":"Code Thumbnails: Using Spatial Memory to Navigate Source Code"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"asset-content\">\n<p>Modern development environments provide many features for navigating source code, yet recent studies show the developers still spend a tremendous amount of time just navigating. Since existing navigation features rely heavily on memorizing symbol names, we present a new design, called Code Thumbnails, intended to allow a developer to navigate source code by forming a spatial memory of it. To aid intra-file navigation, we add a thumbnail image of the file to the scrollbar, which makes any part of the file one click away. To aid interfile navigation, we provide a desktop of file thumbnail images, which make any part of any file one click away. We did a formative evaluation of the design with eleven experienced developers and present the results.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!-- .asset-content --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Modern development environments provide many features for navigating source code, yet recent studies show the developers still spend a tremendous amount of time just navigating. Since existing navigation features rely heavily on memorizing symbol names, we present a new design, called Code Thumbnails, intended to allow a developer to navigate source code by forming a 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