Editing Text

Abstract

As chapter 11 explains, the StyledText widget receives a disproportionate amount of attention from SWT’s developers, because it forms the core of Eclipse. As the raison d’être of Eclipse, it enjoys the preferential treatment usually reserved for star athletes, rock stars, or supermodels. Such a VIP could never be left to languish with only the raw widget interface that StyledText provides. Instead, JFace wraps StyledText with such an extensive MVC implementation that all the other widgets chafe with resentment. Sprawling across eight distinct packages, all of whose names begin with org. eclipse. jface. text, and all of which teem with both classes and interfaces, the text-editing framework in JFace would require tomes for complete coverage. To explore it fully would mean describing how to build an award-winning programmer’s editor, which stretches far beyond the scope of this book. Instead, this book settles for a single chapter that covers the high points, but hits enough to prepare you to use JFace’s text editing capabilities in your applications. It focuses on creating a single application—a simple Perl editor—but explains the various technologies it uses to create the program.