Eclipse word wrapping, volume 3
Some background first: I have been using eclipse for almost four years now and if there's something which keeps me going back to other editors, it is the word wrapping feature (or its lack of it).
First there was not such a feature, or it was enabled for simple text editors only - not the PHP editor. That meant you had to choose between text highlighting and word wrapping. In practical terms, you ended up ditching eclipse and using another editor, because it's just unpractical to keep remembering which file had long enough lines for deserving word wrapping and opening it with a different editor.
Then somehow the feature appeared but guess what? it's not available if you're using the new PHP plug in, Eclipse PDT, which I'm using because it's better.
I have found a Google Summer Of Code project exclusively dedicated to provide word wrapping in Eclipse. And I don't know if I should be happy or sad that such a thing deserves a project on its own. By reading at the author's blog, it seems there's a horrible mess with the editors. No wonder the options appeared and disappeared in each version.
This experimental plugin works, but it does strange things with the line numbers. The author warns about it so I'm not complaining about that, I'm just pointing at that. And the fact that there are little programs outside there (Crimson Editor, PSPad, TextMate…) which are able to do word wrapping without any fuss. Hey, it's even available with a couple of keystrokes in some programs!
So please Eclipse developers, instead of adding more superfeatures such as folding for and if blocks (which may be useful) could you please focus on this insignificant, apparently irrelevant feature which can become very annoying, specially when editing super long text strings in javascript? (or when trying to highlight a part of a very long line while making sure the mouse keeps on the same line and so it doesn't jump to the next line, thus ruining all the selection and you having to start from the beginning).
It would make all of us super happy and even the world would be a better place.
Please? please? Can I have one for Christmas?
I don't want to write an Eclipse word wrapping, volume 4.
Jcl
20071121
Although it is amazing and horrible that Eclipse doesn't include such basic functionality… its not less amazing and horrible that:
1) you write long lines that require wrapping when programming
and 2) you still make text selections with the mouse
:D
sole
20071121
1) HTML is calling, they want their whitespace in place!!!!
2) Sometimes is quicker than selecting with the keyboard.
sole
20071121
Don't get me wrong, I prefer not to have to do any of that… obviously I would rather be doing ActionScript or something else rather than HTML!
Rami Kayyali
20071121
Eclipse is one bulky beast, and it's surprising they don't have word-wrapping for PHP.
You could try Komodo if you're looking for an IDE. But as an editor on Windows, I don't think anything beats UltraEdit.
sole
20071121
No, I'm not looking for an IDE - for that I already have Eclipse :-)
I think Ultraedit doesn't do any type of Class outlining, does it? That's the main reason why I use Eclipse. It's so cool to right click over a class and say 'show definition'. And it shows you where the class has been defined!
Still haven't seen that in any other editor (which is understandable).
Harald
20080209
This is truly embarrassing. Just now I thought to write a little README for a new project I am starting and I cannot even write the first paragraph, because the silly eclipse editor does not wrap the line but keeps scrolling right to infinity. So I am using trusted and tested Xemacs again. Ridiculous.
sole
20080211
Yes, sad but true :-/