When working with a document, users often perform context-specific repetitive edits \u2013 changes to the document that are similar but specific to the contexts at their locations. Programming by demonstration\/examples (PBD\/PBE) systems automate these tasks by learning programs to perform the repetitive edits from demonstration or examples. However, PBD\/PBE systems are not widely adopted, mainly because they require modal UIs \u2013 users must enter a special mode to give the demonstration\/examples. This paper presents Blue-Pencil, a modeless system for synthesizing edit suggestions on the fly. Blue-Pencil observes users as they make changes to the document, silently identifies repetitive changes, and automatically suggests transformations that can apply at other locations. Blue-Pencil is parameterized \u2013 it allows the \u201dplug-and-play\u201d of different PBE engines to support different document types and different kinds of transformations. We demonstrate this parameterization by instantiating Blue-Pencil to several domains \u2013 C# and SQL code, markdown documents, and spreadsheets \u2013 using various existing PBE engines. Our evaluation on 37 code editing sessions shows that Blue-Pencil synthesized edit suggestions with a precision of 0.89 and a recall of 1.0, and took 199 ms to return suggestions on average. Finally, we report on several improvements based on feedback gleaned from a field study with professional programmers to investigate the use of Blue-Pencil during long code editing sessions. Blue-Pencil has been integrated with Visual Studio IntelliCode to power the IntelliCode refactorings feature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When working with a document, users often perform context-specific repetitive edits \u2013 changes to the document that are similar but specific to the contexts at their locations. Programming by demonstration\/examples (PBD\/PBE) systems automate these tasks by learning programs to perform the repetitive edits from demonstration or examples. However, PBD\/PBE systems are not widely adopted, mainly 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