Friday, May 11, 2007

Thoughts on Quick Access

The new Quick Access feature for Eclipse 3.3M7 (aka CMD-3) is pretty slick. But I think it's not quite right.

There are two changes I would make:
  • Content Assist command completion If I type "comme" and the only commands left are matching on the first part of the phrase "comment", I should be able to complete the rest of the phrase. I guess I'm not exactly looking for the CMD-space type of completion, but the Emacs-style TAB completion.
  • Command parameterization: I'd like to be able to supply parameters to my commands. For instance, I'd like to have a command for "Show View", which would require you to follow with a parameter specifying the view name, either by its extension's name or id. I realize that Eclipse doesn't expose the ids to the users, and this becomes a sort of power-user feature. I'd say this is also a bit like Emacs.
You can see this is a short distance from scripting (a la, as you would guess, Emacs), which is what I really want.

Man I need to review Eclipse Monkey.

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