Recording more actions?(mouse behaviors, etc)

[YoungSeok Yoon]

Hello.

I am a graduate student working at Carnegie Mellon University.

I'm interested in how the programmers use the code editors in general
and how to improve the code editing environment to improve the programmers
productivity.

In that context, I'm planning to perform a study with several programmers
and analyze their behavior while they are coding.
In order to do this effectively, an event recorder of a code editor is needed
to
record all the events of the programmers such as the keystrokes, moving cursor
or marking selection via mouse, scrolls, and so on.

It must be possible to reproduce every source code written by the programmers
from the scratch
by the recorded transcripts (xml or whatever.).

I believe that your "PracticallyMacro" plugin would be a good start point to
implement what I want.
However, the purpose of PracticallyMacro is somewhat different.
Roughly speaking, there could be two possible ways to deal with this.

1) Copy current project and build a totally different plugin.

2) Add sophisticated options (what kind of actions to record or not) to
current project.

Which one would be better for you? I want to hear your opinion.

Thanks!

[Ernest]

I think you would have to get your own copy of the code, modify, and build
your own plugin. My macro plugin only records on request and mainly deals with
Eclipse at the Command level. I don't do anything with selection either. So, I
think you could copy the parts that capture commands and add capturing of
other editing info (like selections or cursor movements) and make the code
so that it always records. Then you'd have to save the command data somewhere
for later analysis.

I don't know that your goal being able to reproduce the source code from the
log is feasible though. There are lots of events to capture (like editors
being saved/opened/closed/focused) and I think it would be difficult to
determine and capture them all. That's not to say that you couldn't analyze
the logs, just that I don't know if you could really do playback reliably.

It's also possble that a tool like SWTBot has a record mode you could use.

[YoungSeok Yoon]

Okay. I also think that fully reproducing everything will be very tough to do,
but I'll try to be close to that :)

Thank you very much for your quick response.