TextTools Plug-in for Eclipse, version 2.3.0

Description

A collection of text tools extending the Eclipse text editors and newly also the Mylyn. The tools / commands are available in the pop-up menu when a user right-clicks in any "standard-enough" text editor (so e. g. the Mylyn's task comment editor is not supported). The commands can also be invoked via a keyboard shortcut (one can redefine them in Eclipse preferences, of course).

The commands are:

• Remove Diacritics (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+D) ... removes accents from the selected text

• changes.xml ... tools for editing the changes.xml file for the Maven Changes Plugin

• |-- Insert <action> From the Current Task (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+T, A) ... inserts a new <action> element based on the data of the currently activated Mylyn task. Define (e. g. in eclipse.ini) a system variable named "default.task.owner" to override the string which is output in the "dev" attribute (defaults to the owner of the task).

• |-- Create <release> Tag (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R, C) ... for now, it simply just always outputs this: <release date="in SVN" description="" version="${version}-SNAPSHOT"></release>

• |-- Finish <release> Start Tag (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R, F) ... takes a selected <release> tag and converts it to <release date="now as yyyy-mm-dd" description="" version="${version}">, so the file gets ready for a Maven release.

The commands contributed to the Mylyn task editor context menu are:

• Sum Hours...

• |-- From (Measured Time|Text) To (the Add Field|Clipboard) ... tired of manually filling in the hours worked? These commands do what is written, simply choose the variant which suits you the best. The commands modifying the 'Add' field were tested with tasks from Bugzilla and from JIRA.

Installation

Simply put the downloaded plug-in jar into the eclipse/dropins folder and restart Eclipse.

Debugging

Launch Eclipse with the -consoleLog option to see output written from the plug-in.

Implementation notes

• Assigning a keyboard shortcut to a menu objectContribution has shown as not that easy (in fact impossible), had to be rewritten to command/handler: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12457206/key-binding-to-popup-menu-item-in-eclipse-helios.

• So we add a command to each pop-up menu of a text editor "in the modern way" - again this is not as easy as it might seem: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1356798/how-do-you-contribute-a-command-to-an-editor-context-menu-in-eclipse. Maybe a look into source code of some Eclipse "native" plugins could help making it simpler?

• If the excellent AnyEdit tools plugin was ever about to require / have build for Java 6 (requires Java 1.4+ now), then it would seem more practical to have the 'Remove Diacritics' command merged into that plug-in...

Requirements

• Java 6 or more
• Eclipse (tested on 3.6 aka Helios)
• Mylyn (for the 'Insert <action> From the Current Task' command and the task editor commands)

Meta

• author: Petr Bodnár (p.bodnar@centrum.cz)
• www: http://sourceforge.net/p/etinyplugins/
• see CHANGELOG for history of changes

Future features?

• changes.xml actions for the <release> tag: Look for (check) release version in pom.xml of the parent project.
• Insert <action> From the Current Task: Enable selecting a task from list of available tasks instead of always using the currently activated task.
• Insert <action> From the Current Task: Enable definition of the default task owner via Preferences instead of a system property.
• Make the changes.xml commands output generally more customizable (to suit various conventions).
• Customizable format of the 'Sum Hours...' commands output.