[ide-dev] Thoughts about a generic "Open Type" dialog

[Gunnar Wagenknecht <gunnar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I was investigating providing a dialog similar to "Open Type" except that it will show my custom artifact types. While providing my own dialog with my own artifacts is easy, I'm really struggling with the key binding.

Here is the story:
- ⇧⌘T taken by JDT
- ⇧⌘R taken
- ⇧⌘A taken by PDE
- ⇧⌘Q/W/E taken
- ⇧⌘Y/Z/X/C taken

There is a really high competition for those because it's doable with a single hand. :)

Looking at a few other plug-ins we discovered that:
- ⇧⌘T hijacked by JSDT
- ⇧⌘T hijacked by CDT

Thinking about usability and consistency, I do prefer the ⇧⌘ sequence, which seems to be pattern for "open stuff".

Thus, by having an extensible "Open Things" dialog I was thinking that we could free up ⇧⌘A and make ⇧⌘T a consistent experience for the Eclipse tool stack.

The requirements I would set for this dialog:
- allow plug-ins to contribute content
- keep the UI as simple as possible
- allow filtering of things
- be smart about the context where the dialog is opened

The latter one would be a key feature for me, i.e. it would rank JDT results higher when in a JDT perspective/view/editor.

The actions items I see:
- provide dialog in Platform IDE
- modify JDT to switch that dialog
- modify PDT to switch to that dialog (freeing up ⇧⌘A)

However, before going down that path and investing further time, I wanted to reach out to this group for gathering feedback. Clearly, that won't fly without by-in from the teams mentioned above (which is a different discussion). Let's focus on the technical parts for now.

-Gunnar


-- 
Gunnar Wagenknecht
gunnar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, http://guw.io/