[platform-ui-dev] Browser-like navigation in Eclipse UI?

["Cagatay Kavukcuoglu" <cagatayk@xxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I'd like to work on contributing browser style navigation to Eclipse UI.
I have a plugin you can get from http://sourceforge.net/projects/nox
that provides similar functionality, but I believe this is better
provided by the UI itself, more so after the recent changes to handling
of perspectives and the editor area.

I've been thinking about how to best provide this functionality in
Eclipse for some time. I wanted to hear what everyone here thinks before
actually writing code and see if this is feasible or even desired, so
here goes:

A navigation bar that would be anchored above all the workbooks in the
editor area, providing back and forward drop-downs along with a label
that shows the fully qualified name of the active editor's input.
Ideally, all navigation within the workbench such as:

 - opening files
 - performing any action on Java elements which results in opening 
   editors or revealing selections in an editor
 - performing any action on an object that implements IAdaptable
   which results in opening editors or revealing selections in an editor

should be visible in the history. At the very least, editor inputs for
all opened files should be in the history (this would be very limited
but have a correspondingly simple implementation).

The navigation bar can also provide a more visible UI for changing
working sets that apply to a workbench page (considering the latest
working set RFC) and pinning editors so they won't be reused.

I have some design ideas that I also want to discuss if this seems
doable to the folks here.


Cagatay

--CK.