RE: [cdt-dev] Enhancement for CDT search dialog

["Leherbauer, Anton" <Anton.Leherbauer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I'll answer the simple questions:

> - rectangular selection in the Editor

That's one of the most wanted editor enhancements.
See https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=19771

> - that features that jEdit's "whitespace"-plugin has

If I only knew what the jEdit whitespace plug-in does...
Anyway, making whitespace characters visible is an Eclipse 3.3 feature.

> - a general indenting algorithm (not sure if this has been implemented
in Eclipse or at least for CDT in the meantime)

CDT 4.0 has support for configurable (auto-)indenting and formatting.

Toni
--
Anton Leherbauer
Wind River CDT Team, Austria

-----Original Message-----
From: cdt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:cdt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Christoph Anton Mitterer
Sent: Monday, May 21, 2007 6:16 PM
To: cdt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [cdt-dev] Enhancement for CDT search dialog

Hi.

I hope that's not off topic, if so please apologize ;-)

I've been using jEdit as my favourite programming editor for years now,
but finally I'd like to switch to Eclipse. But there are some features
that I miss in Eclipse that jEdit has:
- rectangular selection in the Editor
- that features that jEdit's "whitespace"-plugin has
- a general indenting algorithm (not sure if this has been implemented
in Eclipse or at least for CDT in the meantime)

But the most important is, the in my opinion, superior search dialog of
jEdit.
As far as I can see, Eclipse in combination with CDT comes with two
search functions, the standard Eclipse search (per default via  Ctrl-F)
and the C/C++ search (per default via Ctrl+H).


What I like about the C/C++ search (which apparently comes from CDT) ist
the possibilty to search for symbols (like classes or variables, etc.)
which the standard Eclipse search cannot.

But the first bad thing is, that the dialogs for both are pretty
different. I'd suggest that there should be done some effort to make
them more similar (of course this is not fully possible as the C/C++
language search provides more options as the standard search).

Anyway there is one feature that all searches in Eclipse lack. It's what
jEdit calls "hypersearch".
It's just a small feature but in my opinion - and what I've seen from
may websites, forums etc. - and from many others it's extremely useful
for programing.

Currently, when using C/C++ search, there is a node for each file in
which results are found (in the Search view) and a subnote, with the
number of matches.
To do about the same what jEdit's hyper search does would require the
following:
Add more subnodes, where each subnode is exactly one found result (per
file).
The subnode should contain something like "linenumber: linecontents".
When you click on a subnode, the editor should jump to the line. The
context menu should allow to remove subnodes (of course only from the
search result but not the line from the code).


Why is this function so useful:
Well it gives a much better overview of the search results. You cannot
only see how many results were found but (in a list) where they were
found (throught the line numbers) and what the places in the code
contain (the line contents).
This is usefule because very often the line contents give the programmer
an idea about what happens there, and so he can decide wheter it is the
right line or not (without having to actually go to the line and read it
"manually").

The main advantage of the ability to remove subnodes is: If you have
some modifications to make, or some checks to perform on all lines that
contain the searched string, it is handy to check which result-lines you
already processed (by removing it from the search results).

As you can see, this is only a very little feature and not a difficult
request
like: Please provide GTK+/Glade for Visual Editor ^^ But I think that
it's worth enough to be included in CDT's C/C++ search, and if possible
you might try to even bring the people responsible for the standard
search of Eclipse and perhaps even those responsible for other
language-searches to add this feature too.

There's alread a bug report in Eclipse bugzilla and I've already voted
for it,... but the report is some years old and I don't thing anything
will happen via the bugzilla issue. So I've decided to try to request
inclusing in CDT as a first step :-)

Best wishes,
Chris.

btw: Can anyone tell me when CDT will be fully included in the Eclipse
core (or whatever they call it)? I think it's pretty much discriminating
that the Java Development Plugins are part of it and CDT not.