Visual augmentation of source code editors: A systematic review
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Source code written in textual programming languages is typically edited in integrated development environments or specialized code editors. These tools often display various visual items, such as icons, color highlights or more advanced graphical overlays directly in the main editable source code view. We call such visualizations source code augmentation. In this paper, we present a first systematic mapping study of source code augmentation approaches and tools. We manually reviewed the metadata of 5,553 articles published during the last twenty years in two phases -- keyword search and references search. The result is a list of 103 relevant articles and a taxonomy of source code augmentation approaches with seven dimensions, which we used to categorize the resulting list of the surveyed articles. We also provide the definition of the term source code augmentation, along with a brief overview of historical development and augmentations available in current industrial IDEs.
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