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Re: [platform-ui-dev] [Editor Mgmt] Make EditorManager$Editor adaptable

From: "Eduardo Pereira" <Eduardo_Pereira@xxxxxxx>
> I want to understand why users end up with to many opened editors (5+). I
> think that this is the real problem and should not happen but we have
> talked a lot about editor reuse and could not conclude much since each
> user wanted it implemented in a different way. A implemented a few way and
> tested them but could not get it to be the default eclipse behavior.

I find myself amused by Randy's comment about "bad habits" - seems to be a
trend lately to tell people who question this or that bit of Eclipse UI that
they just need to unlearn some bad habits - and mystified that you think 5
is a lot of open editors. You must be working with a different Eclipse than
I am. ;-}

The number of open editors roughly corresponds to the user's current
'working set' - the files that are under active modification and the files
that must be read to know how to do the modification. Virtually every
non-trivial change in a plugin requires opening and reading a number of
Eclipse files. Some Eclipse javadoc is very good, but on average it's
skimpy. Then there are the behaviors that are not documented at all, just
buried in the code. Is there a standard way to override a behavior? Don't
know. Read more code. Does the change affect plugin.xml? Then it probably
affects plugin.properties.

Not to pick on Eclipse. Yesterday I needed to put together a Xerces XNI
pipeline, which, except that such a thing is possible, is virtually
undocumented. My working set from Xerces alone was about 10 files; every
example in the standard code, every interface. Hmm. There's no standard way
to augment the pipeline + you can't do all of what I needed to do in a
pipeline, because it's done before it ever hits the pipeline. How to
override the behavior using only public API? Another handful of files.

Believe me, nobody is happier than I am to close all those files and start
fresh. But I have found that for every time I leave a file open
unnecessarily - which is very easy to do, since I'm solving problems not
managing tabs - there's a time when I close one prematurely and have to
re-open it. Guess which action takes more time to recover from?

I find the scrolling tabs virtually useless and fairly ugly to boot and
basically survive because of the Ctrl-F6 list. Don't really want another
view - already have plenty of those - but I'd just as soon not see the tabs
at all.

Just one guy's use cases. ;-}

Bob



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