Saturday
Jan222011
F3 - Open Definition
Saturday, January 22, 2011 at 03:41PM The Eclipse plug-in for Mascara development is progressing steadily.
Newest feature is support for "Open Definition". Place the caret on an identifier (variable name, property, function name, whatever) and hit F3 (or select "Open Definition" on the right-click context menu). The editor will jump to the definition of the identifier, even if it is a different file.
It also works with classic JavaScript code, by the way [1].
This feature is a major milestone because it shows deep integration between the editor and the compiler AST. Additional code-aware features like "Show References", "Show Call-graph" etc. can be built upon this infrastructure.
It also makes development much more pleasant and fun.
[1] As long as you don't get too fancy.
Reader Comments (3)
Will these great features like context related location of definitions or code completion be published in the Mascara python compiler scripts? It would be great if they would be somehow useable for integration into other code editors (i.e. own Visual Studio Projects) too.
@René: Much of the editor-integration code is in Python and editor-agnostic, only the UI part is specific for Eclipse. If there is interest in a Visual Studio-extension for Mascara, I could look into creating it. Right now, most of the interest seem to be around Eclipse.
I meant not an extension for Visual Studio, but for own editors build in VS, i.e. with C# or so. Anyway - I think the Eclipse extension is also good, esp. as it may be extended with self-written plugins, which leads also to a customized editor product, too. :)