Code Bubbles Documentation

General Information

Using Code Bubbles takes a little getting used to. While it is designed so that migrating from Eclipse to Code Bubbles should be straight-forward, the bubble manipulation and navigation facilities are unique. Code editors in Bubbles use the same editing key bindings as Eclipse (to the best of our knowledge), with some extra capabilities thrown in as well. The left mouse button is used for selection. The right mouse button is used for moving bubbles (or groups of bubbles or the bubble area) around and, when clicked, for obtaining a pull-down menu of context-sensitive options. The middle mouse button removes bubbles (as does ESC and ^W).

The function keys F3 and F4 provide direct navigation.  When the focus is over an identifier, F3 will go to the bubble containing the definition of the identifier, while F4 will go to the uses of that identifier.  When there are multiple instances (multiple definitions dues to overloading or multiple uses), a "bubble stack" will appear instead of an individual bubble.  Here you can click on the different instances to expand then, and can either edit them in place or drag them out of the stack to be individual bubbles.  These navigation functions try to be intelligent and not duplicate the original bubble.

Another way of navigating is to use the package explorer.  (It should come up initially on the right, but can be moved wherever you want it or removed completely.  Right clicking on the bubble are (outside of a bubble) will bring up a local package explorer along with a top-level menu.  If the package explorer isn't present, a button on this menu will bring it back.)  Typing in to the package explorer text box (at the top) will restrict the displayed elements to those whose names contain the word(s) typed.  This should make it easy to find code you are looking for.  Shift-return in the package explorer brings up a text search on the text you typed, providing another means of navigation.

Other useful key sequences are menu-shift-B (menu is either control on Mac or meta on Linux/Windows) which expands all ellisions in the current window and grows the window to include the text (up to a reasonable limit; menu-shift-Q which adds a block commen; menu-shift-J which adds a JavaDoc comment;  menu-shift-P which tries to fix the errors in the selected code; alt-C (ctrl-C on Mac) which creates a separate bubble for the method containing the cursor; and alt-X which is similar but cleans the original bubble.

In addition to the right-click menu when clicking in the bubble area (main display), there are other more specialized menus.  Try right clicking on the bar along the top of the display -- it includes useful features like removing all bubbles or all visible bubbles.  Try clicking on items in the package explorer.  This provides options for creating new classes, etc.  Right clicking on text in an editor also provides a context-sensitive menu.

Leaving the cursor in one place will bring up context sensitive help options.  The "Tell me" choice for these will do a demonstation with voice of the chosen feature.  This information is also available on a web page.  Additional help is available from the help button on the top right.  This includes key bindings.