Sunday, October 31, 2010

e4 - Eclipse 4.x - Second Impression

I have been using the latest builds of Eclipse 4.x SDK for my daily work for the last 6 weeks. The overall stability has improved gradually, and the NPEs are quite rare now. Some of the bugs I filed were also fixed  quite quickly during M3 - Bug 325834 , Bug 327154. But there are still a few things which must work but don't.
  • Ability to customize a perspective (Bug 320478)
  • Ability to set or change key bindings (Bug 317299)
  • Plus I am a bit confused about the 'Editor Area' introduced in 4.1 M3. Does this mean I should not create multiple editor stacks? Should I create multiple editor stacks only in the editor area? Will this editor area continue to take extra space as it does in M3? In 3.x we had a editor only area, are we going back towards that? M4 is supposed to have a more polished implementation of the 'Editor area', I will wait for that.
I am also hoping that Editor tab rendering could be improved significantly in Eclipse 4.x (Bug 325422).

    1 comment:

    1. Deepak, first off, thanks a lot for using the 4.1 SDK and for your feedback. This 'first hand' information is crucial to our success...

      Here's the current state of affairs and where we're going on your remaining issues:

      The new 'Editor Area' is quite naive right now, polishing this will be top of the list for M4. At the very least we won't show the area at all unless you have actually split the Editor Area but we are investigating other approaches as well.

      The Commands infrastructure is still stabilizing, this is certainly the most complex area of the existing 3.x code so it's also very hard to merge into the 'e4 way'. Once it converges we'll be able to re-enable perspective customizations as well as the Key Bindings pref page...

      Aside from that in M4 we'll be focusing on the startup/shutdown life cycle to see where we can gain some extra performance.

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