TextPad in Eclipse
Posted: Fri Mar 18, 2005 5:31 pm
I've been checking this forum (and the TextPad website in general) once a week for about a year and a half now. And, in that time, it's become glaringly obvious that the Helios staff prefers to work behind closed doors, without giving even the tiniest peek into what plans they have for the future.
It'd be great to have editable macros and code-folding and method lists and a zillion other features. And it may be the case that those features are currently in active development by Helios. Maybe they're nearly finished. TextPad 5 might be released next week. Or maybe next year. Or never. Who knows.
But, in the mean time, I've become an active user of Eclipse, an IDE framework (primarily used with Java, though there are plugins for other languages as well). Eclipse has code folding. Eclipse has method lists. Eclipse provides a detailed object model that could be automated with a scripting language (though I don't think anyone has implemented that yet).
However, I still find myself periodically jumping back to TextPad for certain text-editing features. For example, I love the way that TextPad allows you to select arbitrary columns of text (ALT-select, but only when line-wrap is turned off), rather than limiting you to row-based selections. I also appreciate the case-control functions in TextPad (control-shift-U to Proper Case A Sentence, for example).
So, because of the unique features in TextPad, I keep coming back to it again and again. Eclipse has lots of advanced features that are missing in TextPad, but TextPad has lots of little gems that I can't live without.
Thinking about it this morning, I realized that there are two ways that I could eventually get the perfect IDE:
1. Wait (potentially forever) for TextPad to implement all the advanced IDE features that I need.
2. Write a few Eclipse plug-ins (very do-able, within a short period of time) to fill in the gaps wherever those tiny but essential TextPad features are missing from Eclipse.
I've decided to go with option #2. As such, I just created a project on SourceForge to start working on this project. (I'll post a link here as soon as the project has been approved by the SF admins.) I'd appreciate as much help as I can get from experienced Java developers, especially those with experience writing Eclipse plugins. I'm a Java developer myself, but I've never developed an Eclipse plugin before, so this will be new to me.
Hopefully, within a few months, we can start porting unique TextPad functionality into Eclipse. Then we'll all have an editor that has powerful IDE functionality as well as intuitive, intelligent text handling. What's more, it'll run in Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, or any of a dozen other operating systems.
It'd be great to have editable macros and code-folding and method lists and a zillion other features. And it may be the case that those features are currently in active development by Helios. Maybe they're nearly finished. TextPad 5 might be released next week. Or maybe next year. Or never. Who knows.
But, in the mean time, I've become an active user of Eclipse, an IDE framework (primarily used with Java, though there are plugins for other languages as well). Eclipse has code folding. Eclipse has method lists. Eclipse provides a detailed object model that could be automated with a scripting language (though I don't think anyone has implemented that yet).
However, I still find myself periodically jumping back to TextPad for certain text-editing features. For example, I love the way that TextPad allows you to select arbitrary columns of text (ALT-select, but only when line-wrap is turned off), rather than limiting you to row-based selections. I also appreciate the case-control functions in TextPad (control-shift-U to Proper Case A Sentence, for example).
So, because of the unique features in TextPad, I keep coming back to it again and again. Eclipse has lots of advanced features that are missing in TextPad, but TextPad has lots of little gems that I can't live without.
Thinking about it this morning, I realized that there are two ways that I could eventually get the perfect IDE:
1. Wait (potentially forever) for TextPad to implement all the advanced IDE features that I need.
2. Write a few Eclipse plug-ins (very do-able, within a short period of time) to fill in the gaps wherever those tiny but essential TextPad features are missing from Eclipse.
I've decided to go with option #2. As such, I just created a project on SourceForge to start working on this project. (I'll post a link here as soon as the project has been approved by the SF admins.) I'd appreciate as much help as I can get from experienced Java developers, especially those with experience writing Eclipse plugins. I'm a Java developer myself, but I've never developed an Eclipse plugin before, so this will be new to me.
Hopefully, within a few months, we can start porting unique TextPad functionality into Eclipse. Then we'll all have an editor that has powerful IDE functionality as well as intuitive, intelligent text handling. What's more, it'll run in Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, or any of a dozen other operating systems.