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Re: [platform-ui-dev] Generic Editor (was Re: Enhanced extensibility for the default text editor in Eclipse)

On 07/14/2016 12:55 PM, Fabio Zadrozny wrote:
Also, with the current format of having a separate editor, I'm not really sure what could be better by having LiClipseText providing extensions to it instead of just using the LiClipseText editor directly.
The idea with this editor isn't to provide the Liclipse feature, but to provide a new framework for implementing a textual editor and a generic editor that could work on most languages (using composition via extension points rather than inheritance).
TextMate support would only be a possible way to contribute features to that editor, many others would be possible (simply highlighting keywords for example can be enough in many cases). We do not want the generic editor to depend on TextMate nor Liclipse, but we would like it to be kindly able to integrate external features such as the ones provided by Liclipse.
The only thing it adds is that it's in Eclipse itself -- with a somewhat more restricted view of the world -- personally
That's exactly the goal. Eclipse IDE has some millions of users. Very few of them will install Liclipse or whatever else extension (this is true for any extension, they hit a very few proportion of the target users using raw Eclipse IDEs). So about the TextMate thing, or other grammars for more languages, the goal is exactly to have it in Eclipse itself, to make sure many users can take advantage of it.

I think LiClipseText could be added to packages such as http://www.eclipse.org/orbit if it really needs to be distributed along with Eclipse, although even having it *just* at the marketplace and not bundled directly to add more things to the core which already has a ton of things to maintain, seems a good solution for me -- anyways, LiClipseText is EPL, so, anyone can use it and adapt it as needed ;)
If this is to become a critical part of the IDE, I'd find dangerous to just include Liclipse as it: it's going to need some maintenance, and you seem to be lacking time for that. So, from Platform POV, it seems safer to reimplement parts of it that or to find alternatives that seem more "sustainable", than to depend on legacy code that author cannot commit on maintaining.

--
Mickael Istria
Eclipse developer at JBoss, by Red Hat
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