Re: Neat features in Eclipse editor

[Dan Nicolaescu]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

  > I just got a demo of the Eclipse editor and saw these features
  > which we should have in Emacs.
  > 
  > * Having tabs above a window to switch buffers in it.
  > 
  > * "Perspectives" are named persistent window configurations.  We have
  > had the window configuration mechanism in GNU Emacs since the
  > beginning but we have never developed a good user interface to take
  > advantage of them.  Eclipse's user interface seems to be good.

There are (at least) 2 key features that make Eclipse's perspectives
very useful:
     - the UI to select/switch them
     - the fact that there's a predefined set of perspectives that are
     useful for specific tasks, and it's easy to teach users about how
     to perform certain tasks using them.

  > * Imenu could be extended into a file-structure browsing mechanism
  > using code like that of customize-groups.

Doesn't `speedbar' already provide something very similar to (if
not exactly) that?

  > * Display something in the margin on lines that have compilation
  > errors.
  > 
  > * Compilation error navigation bar, parallel to the scroll bar,
  > indicating where in the buffer there are compilation errors.
  > Perhaps we could arrange to display these error indications on top
  > of the scroll bar itself.  That depends on to what extent toolkit
  > scroll bars are extensible.

It can also be done with another fringe (and what Eclipse uses seems to
be more like a fringe).

More interesting things that Eclipse provides by default:
- something very similar to `show-paren-mode'
- inserting pairs of parenthesis, quotes, etc.