Neat features in Eclipse editor

From: Richard Stallman Subject: Neat features in Eclipse editor Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2008 17:45:52 -0400

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. * Perspectives work well even if you do the equivalent of C-x 4 C-f because of the distinction between view windows vs file windows. In Emacs this is more or less the "dedicated window" feature, but we have never really made it work for this. * Perspectives also need to interact with the tabs. * Imenu could be extended into a file-structure browsing mechanism using code like that of customize-groups. * Flymake's customization mechanism needs to be both simpler (fewer levels of indirection) and better documented, so it is easier to understand. I find it quite hard to figure out what compilation command it will use. I suggest totally rewriting that part of Flymake, using the simplest mechanism that sufficies for the specific needs. That will be easy for users to customize. * 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.

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