Efficient Development of Consistent Projectional Editors using Grammar Cells
The definition of a projectional editor does not just specify the notation of a language, but also how users interact with the notation. Because of that it is easy to end up with different interaction styles within one and between multiple languages. The resulting inconsistencies have proven to be a major usability problem. To address this problem, we introduce grammar cells, an approach for declaratively specifying textual notations and their interactions for projectional editors. In the paper we motivate the problem, give a formal definition of grammar cells, and define their mapping to low-level editor behaviors. Our evaluation based on project experience shows that grammar cells improve editing experience by providing a consistent and intuitive, text editor-like user experience for textual notations. At the same time they do not limit language composability and the use of non-textual notations, the primary benefits of projectional editors. We have implemented grammar cells for Jetbrains MPS, but they can also be used with other projectional editors.
Mon 31 OctDisplayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change
10:30 - 12:10 | |||
10:30 10mDay opening | Opening SLE | ||
10:40 25mTalk | Parsing and Reflective Printing, Bidirectionally SLE Zirun Zhu National University SOKENDAI, Japan, Yongzhe Zhang National University SOKENDAI, Japan, Hsiang-Shang ‘Josh’ Ko National Institute of Informatics, Pedro Martins University of California at Irvine, USA, João Saraiva University of Minho, Portugal, Zhenjiang Hu National University SOKENDAI, Japan DOI | ||
11:05 25mTalk | Taming Context-Sensitive Languages with Principled Stateful Parsing SLE Nicolas Laurent Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium, Kim Mens Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium DOI Pre-print | ||
11:30 15mTalk | MetaEdit+ for Collaborative Language Engineering and Language Use (Tool Demo) SLE Juha-Pekka Tolvanen MetaCase, Finland DOI Pre-print Media Attached | ||
11:45 25mTalk | Efficient Development of Consistent Projectional Editors using Grammar Cells SLE Markus Völter itemis, Germany, Tamás Szabó itemis AG / TU Delft, Sascha Lisson itemis AG, Bernd Kolb itemis AG, Sebastian Erdweg Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, Thorsten Berger Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden DOI Pre-print Media Attached |