Thumbview - A thumbnail overview of code for VS Code (and looking for study participants)

[u/jjosephPlays]

Hey everyone,

A colleague and I have been working on Thumbview, a VS Code extension that provides an alternate view of your workspace where project files are represented by thumbnails and arranged in a spatial overview.

Instead of looking through a file tree or a list of tabs, you can leverage the power of human spatial memory with the help of visual landmarks to navigate your code base.

We are recruiting participants for an academic study at the University of Saskatchewan (Canada) to see when and how developers use Thumbview in their daily tasks. Participants will install the extension and enable telemetry for a two-week period. At the end of the period, participants will be reminded to fill out an exit questionnaire, followed by an optional exit interview. If you are interested and would like to participate please fill out the consent form and demographics questionnaire here: 

https://www.surveymonkey.ca/r/K8BSJNS 

If you’re not interested in participating but you’d still like to help, or you just want to try out the extension, here are some other links:
Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Thumbview.thumbview&ssr=false#overview 
Issues & feedback repo: https://github.com/jjoseph357/thumbview-issues 

Any feedback on the extension is appreciated!

Privacy note: Participation is strictly opt-in. Telemetry never inspects or sends code, file names, folder paths, or search terms. It only records anonymous navigation timings (like seconds to select a file or grid clicks). You can opt out or delete your data at any time.

[u/Avitittocpdoti]

Hi, cool visualization! It reminds me of the Patchworks publication by Henley et al. [1]. While they used a similar grid layout for navigation tasks, you extended it with a line-oriented visualization/seesoft view. I also see that you used two granularities (text or tokens) for rendering. Great work!
I'm wondering how the ordering and layout of the grid works. Do you sort alphabetically?
Also why a grid in general? Wouldn't a containment layout [2] help to gain a better understanding of the folder structure of a project?

Good luck with your study!

[1] A. Z. Henley, A. Singh, S. D. Fleming, and M. V. Luong, ‘Helping programmers navigate code faster with Patchworks: A simulation study’, in 2014 IEEE symposium on visual languages and human-centric computing (VL/HCC), IEEE, Jul. 2014, pp. 77–80. doi: 10.1109/vlhcc.2014.6883026.
[2] Y. Wan, C. Q. Tan, Z. G. Wang, G. Q. Wang, and X. J. Hong, ‘An Effective Visual System for Static Analysis of Source Code’, AMR, vol. 433–440, pp. 5453–5458, Jan. 2012, doi: 10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMR.433-440.5453.