Capturing and exploiting fine-grained IDE interactions

Developers interact with IDEs intensively to maximize productivity. A developer´s interactions with an IDE reflect his thought process and work habits. In this paper, we propose a general framework to capture and exploit all types of IDE interactions. We have two explicit goals for the framework: its systematic interception of comprehensive user interactions, and the ease of use in writing customized applications. To this end, we developed IDE++ on top of Eclipse IDE. For evaluation, we built applications upon the framework to illustrate 1) the need for capturing comprehensive, finegrained IDE interactions, and 2) IDE++´s ease of use. We believe that IDE++ is a step toward building next generation, customizable and intelligent IDEs.