Hi,
See below a few question, and then some ideas.
the core of the Generic Text Editor is not dependent on E3.
Can you please elaborate what you specifically mean by this? I'm not a
e4 user myself (not really interested in it for my IDE-related work
since e3 just does the job quite well), so I'm genuinly curious about
what specific criteria are to check to claim something is dependent on
e3 or not.
Are there already stories of the Platform TextEditor working on plain E4
without E3? As long as it's not there, then we cannot really imagine
moving downstream to the Generic Editor.
Also, what is the issue shipping pieces of e3 in an e4 app?
trying to remove E3 dependencies from the Generic Text Editor.
[...]
I browsed the code of the "ExtensionBasedTextEditor"
I confirm this is probably quite hard, I guess the type hierarchy of the
editor itself (and it means a lot as parent are providing a lot of the
value) is full of e3 APIs. But maybe I'm wrong on the type stack for the
Generic Editor is already ready.
but we can gain a lot from this.
Can you please give example of use-case that E4 enables easily that are
impossible or very hard to implement with e3 APIs?
The Generic Text Editor may be a good starting point: it has a lot of
services to interact with and it will be natural to utilize OSGi
services and E4 approach.
If you want to add support for OSGi Services additionally to extension
point in the current Generic Editor, that would be welcome, since it
wouldn't reduce the feature set nor break backward compatibility.
About using the e4 approach, then it seems to me you mean "ability to
load extensions with e4 annotations". It also seems like something that
can be done, if it's not already there.
Can a pure E4 generic editor be backward-compatible with the current one
(read extensions and process them similarly, and have the same feature
set)? If yes, then I would recommend migrating the porting Generic
Editor rather than creating a new one. If we have both, then it's twice
more maintenance cost, the IDE will keep the legacy one that just works
for it and both editors will ultimately diverge, and given the
priorities of the community regarding text edition (mostly the IDE),
there will be new features in the current Generic Editor that won't be
implemented in the pure-e4 one and the pure-e4 one will get obsolete and
will conclude as an expensive unsuccessful experiment.
For this reason, I'm personally -1 to have Platform hosting a new editor
for this, however, I'm +1 in making the Generic Editor as much
e4-friendly as possible (as long as it doesn't have any negative impact).
Cheers,
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