JDT/UI and Platform/Text M5 plan items
We have several new features on our plans for M5.
Some of the more exciting features are:
- Rich hovers (bug 200838): Rich hovers will provide ways to make a hover in the text editor sticky without the necessity to take your hand off the mouse. Rich hovers will also allow to contain links and/or buttons. A first cut of this feature is already available in integration builds >= I20080115-0800. Give it a try and provide feedback. You need to go to the ‘Text Editors’ preference page to enable and configure it:
- Breadcrumb (bug 210830): The breadcrumb in the Java editor shows the element at the cursor position and all its parent elements. The user can invoke actions on any such element. Here is a screen shot of how this may look:
- Templates View (bug 69581): A view showing all text templates. The user can drag and drop from the view to the editor to apply a template and from the editor to the view to create a new template. This is a contribution from Dakshinamurthy Karra.
- Hyperlinking improvement (bug 215473): Allow to present more than one hyperlink target for a given text range. We probably going to show a pop up which shows all possible targets when you CTRL-move over a link position in the editor. This will allow to integrate features like ‘Go to Implementation’ nicely.
- Quick Fix improvement (bug 201878): At the moment if CTRL + 1 finds warnings or errors on the same line, it jumps to the closest problem and offers proposals for that problem. This is sometimes not what you want, e.g. if you want to rename the element at the cursor position. I think a solution is to allow to press CTRL-1 again to jump back to the original cursor position.
As you see there is a lot on the plan. I hope we can provide all these exiting new features for M5. Some of these features are hard to implement. For example the rich hover due to event handling, which differs from platform to platform. Or the breadcrumb due to action enablement when the focus is transfered into the breadcrumb.
January 16th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
I’ve been looking forward to the rich hovers for a while, but now you’ve got me excited about the bread crumb bar. I find both the iTunes and Vista Windows Explorer bread crumb bars to be convenient and intuitive UIs. The bread crumb UI that we have on the Mylyn Task List has also been working quite well (http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/new/images/2.0/working-sets-switch.gif). We had to do some custom widgetery for that UI, and would like to improve it in the near future, so I’m wondering if there is a possibility for reuse between the two UIs. We also had a bunch of deliberation on whether the triangles should go to the right as they do on Vista, or to the left as both we have both chosen, and how they should animate to provide feedback. It’s all very interesting stuff and I’ll follow up more on bug.
January 17th, 2008 at 5:30 am
Yes, to left or to right, this seams to be the question. Fortunately we have a professional UI designer thinking about this and other issues at the moment. Our intention is, that the breadcrumb will be made available to other editors as well, later. The breadcrumb widget itself is implemented as a structured viewer and can be used independently of an editor. The viewer is in the jdt/ui layer and not API for now.
Is it possible to invoke actions on your breadcrumb items? This seams to be the most tricky part.