soledad penadés

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.