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 editor augmentation.
In this paper, we present a first systematic mapping study of source code editor augmentation tools and approaches. 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 editor augmentation tools 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 editor augmentation, along with a brief overview of historical development and augmentations available in current industrial IDEs.

Visual Augmentation of Source Code Editors: A Systematic Mapping Study

The ninth IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT 2021) builds upon the success of the previous eight editions of VISSOFT, which in turn followed after six editions of the IEEE International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis (VISSOFT) and five editions of the ACM Sympo0sium on Software Visualization (SOFTVIS). In 2021, VISSOFT will take place and be co-located with ICSME.

IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT 2021)