Re: [platform-ui-dev] Editor management improvements

[Jared Burns <jared-eclipse@xxxxxxxxx>]

The editor view is intended to address many of these requirements. See my 
inserted comments.

> - Ability to navigate among opened editors quickly

The editor view presents editors as a list which allows the user to quickly 
view all open editors and navigate among them by single selection.

> - Ability to view and define a working set of resources,
>   in a single action, that users will focus on for editing purpose

The editor view allows users to create a working set of resources by 
multiselecting open editors and choosing the "Create working set" action from 
the context menu.

> - Ability to add a resource to the working set easily

The editor view doesn't provide an explicit action to add resources to a 
working set, but it wouldn't be hard to make this trivial. Currently, when 
the user asks to make a working set from their selection, I prompt them for a 
name and require that the name not yet exist. Instead, I plan to let them use 
whatever name they want and prompt to overwrite. To make it even easier, we 
could provide a "Browse..." button which would allow the user to select from the existing working sets.

> - Ability to see full path file name

The editor view doesn't provide this feature today, but it could be added in 
two ways: By providing a setting on the view to show full paths in the 
list and/or by displaying the full path in hover-help.

> - Ability to apply actions (e.g. close) to opened resources that do not
>   belong to the user's working set (this means Eclipse needs to keep track
>   of the working set boundary for opened editors)
> - Ability to close multiple opened editors at once

In the view, the user can multi-select and choose "Close" from the context 
menu.

> - Ability to save contents of multiple opened editors at once

The editor view should be able to provide this feature the same way it 
provides "Close" today.

> - Ability to switch between opened editors with only one hand using
>   accelarator keys

It will be interesting to see how useful this feature will be as the 
navigation history continues to mature. There are still times when I want to 
go to my last editor instead of my last "location", but most of the time it's 
the last location that I want. Providing a good shortcut for the navigation 
history is important. Providing the back/forward editor activation history 
via buttons or a menu will probably be enough.

> - Ability to distinguish opened files via editor tabs under normal
>   circumstances

The space available for the names of files is adjustable but otherwise static 
in the editor view. The users ability to read file names in the view does not 
diminish as the number of editors increases unlike the tabbed approach.

> - Ability to select all clean editors or its compliment easily
> - Ability to see opened editors from all windows
> - Ability to close all but the current editor

The view doesn't provide an explicit action for this, but it is easy to 
do by selecting all editors in the view, deselecting the current editor, and 
choosing "Close" from the context menu.

> - Ability to close all editors of a given type or close all editors that
>   are not a given type


- Jared