LIVE ยท Workshop
Restructuring Structure Editing
Part of the Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Live Programming (LIVE 2021).
Abstract
Structure editors have long promised to improve the programming experience for all, but are often too slow or difficult to use. In this talk, we present a new approach to structure editing, called tile-based editing, that recovers many of the flexible and linear editing affordances of text editors. The idea is to allow disassembly of hierarchical structures into their linear constituents, while assisting and guiding manipulation of those constituents to ensure proper reassembly. We motivate and demonstrate these ideas concretely using tylr, a proof-of-concept tile-based editor.