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If there's a possibility of giving files a color code so you have a quick visual queue of what needs to be done to what. My idea is to instead of having just preset colors, like macintosh finder has, you'd have a list of colors with a description. For example's sake, lets say you add these colors to your list: Red: Less than 70% complete Yellow: 70-99% complete Orange: 100% complete, but needs debugging Green: Completed and debugged Blue: Code freeze Then on each file you can go through and change the status as needed. Sort of like macintosh's finder does. Thanks, James Harr
Simon, not sure where to assign this. It didn't seem to be confined to EditorMgmt so I assigned it to Workbench.
Given that I do not have a Mac, could you explain what the Mac Finder does. Provide a real world example (maybe some screen shots). Also, could you provide a use case for this feature. Give step by step instructions how you would see this working. You seem to indicate you would manually change the file's status and therefore cause them to display in a different colour. That seems pretty labour intensive.
Well, for macintosh what it does (I don't actually own a mac, but I've seen it used). Is you go into the File Info (equivalent to properties) then you select what I beleive is called file status. In which is just a list of about 8 colors. When you change this, it gives the icon a color tint of which you selected. This has no real effect on the file, or how it is accessed. Just how it is displayed. For the most part at school (I've graduated since this posting, so I don't have access to it anymore) we used it for the newspaper to indicate the readyness of an article. Red would indicate the article needs writing all together. Yellow meant it was written, but needed editing. Green meant it was ready. There was nothing on the mac's end that said that a certain color meant a certain thing. The news paper class just adopted that and used it as that. Every one understood what each color meant. In general, that's what I was wishing to implement into Eclipse. If you fealt a file/chunk of code needed a major overhaul, you could right click->properties, then click on Status in the tree on the left. It would give you a list of colors you wanted to tint the icons. Now there are a couple of ways you could implement the list of colors. 1) You could have a list of 8-10 set-in-code colors that you could choose from. 2) Each project would have its own color sets. From the properties -> Status, it would show a list of colors. You could click add, edit, remove, set, or set default. Add would add a color (which would bring up a color selector dialog box with a comment text box) Edit would allow you to edit the color as well as the comment on the color. Remove would remove a selected color Set would set the color tint of the icon Set Default would make whatever the default for new files. In the internals of eclipse, each color would have these attributes: Index Number (integer, would be automatically assigned by eclipse, eg: 7) Color (hex rgb color def, eg: #FF0000) Comment (string, up to 255 chars, eg: Needs lots of work) The index number is primarily for when you edit the color/comment from you list. That way instead of having to change the colors on each file, it would just change the color in the catalog of colors. That and you could have two of the same colors for two different statuses with the only thing differing is the index # and the comment. Why you would want to do this, I don't know. But some people may have a reason for that. Let me know if there's any other info/examples you'd want.
The UI team has not current plans to add in this type of feature. Nevertheless, you or someone else could write a plugin to provide it. - You could have a property of each resource to hold onto the current state (see Core IResource API) - Provide a property page to edit this state (see org.eclipse.ui.propertyPages extension point) - Provide a decorator that would manipulate the icon colour based on the state (see org.eclipse.ui.decorators extension point) Tod, can you comment on whether the current decorator support would allow him to manipulate the icon colour?
The easiest way to do this is to declare your decorator as an underlay and underlay the icon with the color you want. It is actually pretty easily to implement using a lightweight decorator and is a perfect choice for a seperate plugin. Moving to UI Inbox to consider for a later release.
There are currently no plans to work on this feature
