For Oxygen, one of the goals of the Platform contributors was to make it easier for adopters to add support for new textual languages in the Eclipse IDE.
After a review of the current state, a new approach of contributing textual support was introduced in the name of a “Generic and Extensible Text Editor”. This new framework allows to contribute specific behaviour to an existing “generic” editor as usual extensions in plugin.xml without having to fully re-implement an editor.
Most of its promises are already met and this framework has already been used efficiently by several projects (Linux Tools, PDE, Team…) and has enabled much easier enablement programming languages in the IDE thanks to Textmate and Language Server Protocol support.
In this presentation, we’ll present why we thought there was a need for such a more productive framework, which part of the legacy approach we tried to hide from adopters and which ones we want to keep exposing and emphasizing and how to adopt this generic editor for your language by reviewing some existing editors that have already transitioned.
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