Bug 234009

Summary:	[Commands] easy way to set/clear "home" locations
Product:	[Eclipse Project] Platform	Reporter:	Ducky Sherwood <ducky>
Component:	UI	Assignee:	Platform UI Triaged <platform-ui-triaged>
Status:	NEW ---	QA Contact:
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	P3	CC:	Tod_Creasey
Version:	3.4	Keywords:	helpwanted
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:

Description Ducky Sherwood

2008-05-26 15:04:06 EDT

I request that there be an easy way to set a "home" location in source, and an easy way to "jump to home".  For extra credit, make it a stack: have a "clear current home" command, which sets "home" to the previous "home".

Why?

I did a user study where I watched seven professional programmers closely while they did four 20-min Java programming tasks.  I found that there was a real strong tendency to return to a "home" source code location.  They'd do things like go to "home", explore path A, back-back-back to "home", explore path B, back-back-back to "home", etc.  I even saw them sometimes go "home" when the next thing they did was a search (Open Type, Java Search, File Search, or "visual grep" in the Package Explorer) -- which they clearly didn't have to go "home" to do.

Dr. Margaret Storey et al also mentioned in a paper about a tool for tagging/jumping to tags that one of their subjects made a tag called "home", and in email with her, it sounds like they saw the same behaviour I did, so I don't think it's an artifact of how I did my observations:
   http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1180875.1180906

Would having a "jump to home" button be a huge win?  No.  I'm guessing that it would be a medium amount of work with a medium payoff.  (I'm guessing that the biggest issue would be finding keybindings or toolbar space.)

This is *probably* best done as a third-party plug-in first.  If it proves to be really popular, then fold it in to the main code base.

Comment 1 Paul Webster

2008-05-26 15:48:54 EDT

This should be easy to do using bookmarks.  Adding bookmarks can be bound to a key already.  A simple command that either 1) allowed you to always specify the same bookmark, like "Home" or 2) popped up a quick list of bookmarks that made sense (a MRU list, or something) seems like it would work.

PW

Comment 2 Eclipse Webmaster

2019-09-06 15:37:50 EDT

This bug hasn't had any activity in quite some time. Maybe the problem got resolved, was a duplicate of something else, or became less pressing for some reason - or maybe it's still relevant but just hasn't been looked at yet.

If you have further information on the current state of the bug, please add it. The information can be, for example, that the problem still occurs, that you still want the feature, that more information is needed, or that the bug is (for whatever reason) no longer relevant.