Structured Editing for All: Deriving Usable Structured Editors from Grammars

Abstract

Structured editing can show benefits in learnability, tool building, and editing efficiency in programming. However, creating a usable structured editor is laborious and demanding, typically requiring tool builders to manually create or adjust editing interactions. We present Sandblocks, a system that allows users to automatically generate structured editors for every language with a formal grammar available. Our system's input reconciliation process acts on arbitrary syntax trees to provides consistent interactions across our generated editors. Our editors' editing experience is designed to be familiar to users from textual editing but, compared to previous work, requires no manual annotation in the grammars. We demonstrate our editors' usability across languages through a user study (N=18). Compared to conventional text editors, even with minimal training, participants only took on average 21% (JS), 34% (Clojure), and 95% (RegExp) longer and reported that editing felt natural with a score of 6/7.