A tool to suggest similar program element modifications

Many program tasks require continuous modification of similar program elements, which is burdensome on programmers because continuous modifications are time consuming and some modifications are easily overlooked. To resolve this issue, we developed a tool, named SimilarHighlight, which extracted all possible matching elements via similarity patterns from recently modified elements using a sub syntax tree comparison. SimilarHighlight suggests similar program elements that may be modified during the next modification. Potential elements are highlighted and their text can be immediately selected by shortcut keys. Evaluations indicate that SimilarHighlight can improve programming productivity. Currently, SimilarHighlight supports C, C#, JAVA, JavaScript, and PHP, but in the future we will expand it to other languages.