Community
Participate
Working Groups
An outside-the-box, but potentially-useful idea toward potentially resolving the view look-and-feel debate: If views and editors are supposed to all look the same (as they practically do in M8), then maybe we should get rid of the UI concept of an editor altogether and make views and editors the same thing. Editors could just be views that happen to take an IEditorInput and allow multiple instances. In order to do this, off the top of my head, we would need: - The ability for a view optionally to accept an IEditorInput. - The ability for a view that accepts an IEditorInput to be instantiated more than once--have more than one instance. - To change the perspective-definition code so that instead of having an "editor area," you just have a "root view area", which happens to contain the "editing views" within the IDE perspectives. - To change the workbench-state-saving code so that it knows how to deal with this change. This would simplify the UI in several ways: - All UI elements inside the workbench would behave the same way. - RCP developers would no longer be forced to resort to using editors in order to get a view that can have multiple instances. - Special-case code for editor handling would go away in the perspective management code. - It's a simpler overall design.
This is something we had been considering in the RCP space, but it's not going to happen for 3.0. The general idea is not a bad one, though. I know of one app that avoids using editors simply because they want to mix and match views and document panes in the same space. Note that multi-instance views are now supported. See IWorkbenchPage.showView(String id, String secondaryId, int mode), and bug 31612 for background. Aside from the space usage, there are other differences between views and editors. There's the notion of an active editor (IWorkbenchPage.getActiveEditor()), independent of the active part (IWorkbenchPage.getActivePart()). For example: - open a Java editor - the Outline view shows the outline - activate the Package Explorer - the Outline view still shows the outline for the editor Editors also have an open/edit/save lifecycle, views generally do not (although this was loosened in 2.1 with the addition of ISaveablePart, which views can implement in addition to editors). *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 37719 ***
Regarding the notion of the "active editor", this can be implemented semantically as the "part that contributes the global selection." Looked at this way, anything, including a view, could behave like an editor. And as you said, the open/edit/save life cycle isn't necessarily unique to editors any more.
