Developing and evaluating the code bubbles metaphor

Today´s integrated development environments (IDEs) are hampered by their dependence on files and file-based editing. A novel user interface that is based on collections of lightweight editable fragments, called bubbles, which when grouped together form concurrently visible working sets is proposed. An overview of this interface, as well as a summary of the results of a quantitative and a qualitative evaluation of the interface is presented.