Contribute to eclipse.platform.text

[mickaelistria]

This plugins provides a generic feature that is quite popular and that would be nice to have in Eclipse IDE core. Would you consider contributing it to eclipse.platform.text? I would be glad to help.

[mickaelistria]

Reference: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=466532

[caspark]

My first reaction is that stopping at reusing linked mode as I've done and calling it a day for multi-cursor editing is not going to satisfy users/win them back when you consider that IntelliJ IDEA has now gone way beyond that.

This really needs to be implemented at the platform level in Eclipse, and based on my investigation when I started this plugin, I believe that's even fairly doable using existing APIs if you're ok with some of the edge cases not working so well.

That said, I'm certainly open to folding this into eclipse.platform.text as a first step towards proper multi-cursor editing. What do you need from me? I'm happy to relicense code to you if required but I believe it's already under the EPL.

[mickaelistria]

There is no need to relicense anything, since you're already using EPL. I believe you could simply start by cloning eclipse.platform.text repo ( https://git.eclipse.org/r/#/admin/projects/platform/eclipse.platform.text ) add your plugins there (renamed as org.eclipse....), and push the proposed code to Gerrit.
From here, we'll be able to discuss more concretely about how to make the integration better and good enough to be shipped as part of the platform.

[caspark]

It sounds like you're asking me to drive contributing this back to Eclipse.

I'm sorry if I wasn't (or the readme isn't) clear about this, but the chief reason I no longer spend time on this project is that I no longer use Eclipse (I switched to IDEA to make life easier at Atlassian), and so it's hard to make it a priority amongst other more relevant projects, even taking into account the modicum of interest from the community and now yourself.

So, if you need that kind of driving contribution from me to get this folded in, it likely won't happen until (/unless) I switch back to Eclipse again.

[mickaelistria]

Thanks for this explanation.
I've been a bit deeper on this topic, and it seems like a simpler approach would be to rely on the implementation of the "Block selection" already available in Platform and to extend it's concept of Block by allowing Unions of Blocks. This would provide a decent support for multi-cursors, and the remaining concern would only be to find a good enough way to present it to users.