Moldable Spotter: a unified search interface for IDEs

Program comprehension requires developers to reason about many kinds of highly interconnected software entities. Dealing with this reality prompts developers to continuously intertwine searching and navigation. Nevertheless, current integrated development environments (IDEs) address searching by means of many independent and disconnected search tools. This not only impedes developers from reusing search results produced by one search tool as input for another search tool, but it also makes it difficult to find appropriate search tools, in the multitude of other tools provided by an IDE.

To address this problem we start from the realization that having disconnected search tools within an IDE, each designed to work in isolation and on different data types, is part of the problem. We propose Spotter, a model for expressing and combining search tools in a unified way. Spotter has two main goals:

• Provide a uniform yet moldable interface that can work on any object,
• Handle searching through arbitrary levels of object nesting.