If you are a user of our latest milestone build 3.4 M6a (you should!) you might have noticed that some of our hovers have changed their behavior: It is now possible to make them sticky by moving the mouse into the hover. This is much more than just a small enhancement: For us this is important new infrastructure and for you it will not less than change the way you will interact with the Java editor in many areas.

Take as example the Javadoc hover, certainly the most important hover in the Java editor, and compare the 3.3 and the 3.4 hovers.

The Javadoc hover for IInformationControl in 3.3:

The Javadoc hover for IInformationControl in 3.4:

You can see 3 obvious changes:

1. The icon corresponding to the Java element is shown (Bug 220013).
2. Links! (Bug 8112).
3. A tool bar with a resize handle and actions (Bug 216868).

But the most important change you can not see: You can now make the hover sticky by moving the mouse into the hover. This allows to hover over IInformationControl and then move the mouse to the link, or to a toolbar action, and click on it. Without this interaction this features would be pretty useless.

If you don’t like the default behavior then you can configure this interaction on the General > Editors > Text Editors preference page:

As I said: this is infrastructure. It’s not just the Javadoc hover, it’s possible to do this for all hovers. Look at the Problem hover for example:

It’s now possible to see the problems text and invoke a quick fix in the same step; without taking your hand off the mouse. The hover also has actions in the toolbar to configure the annotation preferences as well as the compiler severities for the current problem.

Other hovers in the Java editor, which can be made sticky with the mouse, are the quick diff hover and the annotation hover. But this is work in progress, unfortunately this week is feature freeze for 3.4, but expect to see more enrichable hovers which offer useful actions and links in 3.5!

I can go even further: When I said that this is possible for all hovers, then that was not the full truth. In fact, this is possible for all IInformationControls. In M6 we’ve added a much appreciated small little enhancement: The multiple hyperlink presenter.

Without the ability to move the mouse into the multiple hyperlink presenter pop-up this feature would be completely useless! If you are interested in implementing something like this yourself then check out the MultipleHyperlinkPresenter; it’s all API of course.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 8:54 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.