package com.meikas.blog;

We released a new version of TimeGT today. There are quite many new features, all details are in release notes.

It’s nice to see Eclipse starting to support Git, CVS is so 90’s.

There are quite many read only repos available already. Denis & Karl write a bit more in http://dev.eclipse.org/blogs/eclipsewebmaster/2009/10/28/git-repos-at-eclipse/

Thanks for all the feedback I got.

I forgot to mention in yesterdays post that if anyone is interested in the source code, then it’s available from http://github.com/imeikas/RecentFiles.

About installation

For some reason the updatesite generator leaves something undone or there is another problem, but sometimes the plugin is only visible if you unselect “Group items by category” checkbox. If anyone has encountered this odd behavior and knows how to fix, please tell me.

In Eclipse one thing that is bothered me constantly is organizing the list of files I’m currently working on. I’ve tried the Pin Editor feature (available only if you limit the number of max editors). I’ve tried Mylyn, but I don’t like the way it tries to be clever and hide all other files that don’t match the context and that the end result is still a mess. I found ways around the cleverness, but I couldn’t get rid of the mess and eventually I dropped Mylyn for the nth time.

On one weekend I decided to fix it and wrote a little plugin just for that, showing recently opened files. The plugin tracks your editor openings and if the editor point’s to a real file, adds it to a list. It also allows to bookmark those files so they would stay on top of the list and that they would remain there after Eclipses restart.

A little screenshot of the result:

If you like what you see you can try it out from http://meikas.com/recentfiles/

I was struggling with Index mismatch errors while trying to rebase my git repo from SVN. Google had no good clues and I almost did a clean checkout, when I noticed
Author: ahti not defined in authors.txt file

Adding ahti to my authors file solved all my problems. Rebase worked and I could commit all my changes back to SVN.

I didn’t know authors file played that big role in git-svn. Hope this tidbit of information helps anyone out there with similar problems.

The web is full of code how to add content specific icons for editors, package explorers etc. The kind of icons http://blog.eclipse-tips.com/2008/04/content-type-specific-file-icons.html is talking about.

It is much harder to find how you can get those images when you have a just a file name or IResource to work with. Don’t worry, getting the image is easy:

...
IFile[] filesForURI = ResourcesPlugin.getWorkspace().getRoot().findFilesForLocationURI(fileUri);
if (filesForURI.length > 0) {
  IContentType contentType = IDE.getContentType(filesForURI[0]);
  ImageDescriptor imageDescriptor = PlatformUI.getWorkbench().getEditorRegistry().getImageDescriptor(filesForURI[0].getName(), contentType);
  return imageDescriptor.createImage();
}

Have you ever had the feeling why all the settings are workspace specific. For example why do I have to change the fonts each time I create a new workspace or turn on editor line numbers? There are some tricks, by specifying properties in some ini files, but this is really clumsy (Do you know the property name for the fonts? Without searching?). I think this is something that should be achievable without hacking.

So does anyone know if there is such a plugin that would help synchronize common properties or if there is interest for such a plugin?

Just finished watching the webinar about TDD (Test Driven Development) in Eclipse by Kevin Taylor and I really liked it. Testing in eclipse is sometimes really challenging so anyone giving hints on how to do it better is helping the community a lot.

Presentation itself gave me some new ideas I’m going to try out and pointed me to SWTBot that I’ll definitely check out. Also I liked the idea about using  MVP (Model View Presenter) as it makes testing muchmuch simpler. Kevin also gives a small sample where he adds a button to a simple Twitter client. I really recommend that part, as it gives a good example how to access the UI parts in Eclipse. What I would have liked is a small demo on how he tests the presentation layer, but this was out of scope due to unfortunate 1 hour timelimit. The webinar itself can be found in Eclipse Live under the name Test Driven Development Best Practices for Eclipse RCP.

I just upgraded to Eclipse 3.5M7 and when I wanted to close an editor with changes I noticed that the buttons are in different unintuitive order. I liked the Cancel/OK switch, but save the editor looks strange. Look for yourself.

Old:

New:

This might be because of JFace dialog button order on GTK+

I wasn’t entirely satisfied with my last blog theme so here it is new theme and soon to have more content

I hope you enjoy this theme more than the last one.