Platform Text

About Platform Text

Platform Text provides the basic building blocks for text and text editors within Eclipse and contributes the Eclipse default text editor. It consists of five parts:

  • The text infrastructure provides facilities for text manipulation, position management, and change notification.
  • JFace Text provides UI components for editing and presenting text. It offers support for rule based styling, content completion, formatting, model reconciling, hover help, and vertical rulers.
  • The text editor framework provides the abstract implementation of an Eclipse text editor.
  • The File Buffers plug-in which introduces text file buffers for shared access to the content of a text file in form of an IDocument and and associated IAnnotationModel.
  • A concrete editor implementation: the Eclipse default text editor.

Editors built with this toolkit are for example the JDT Editor or the CDT Editor. Take a look at the JDT screen casts to see some features like the J2SE 5.0 editor support in action.

Optional Plug-ins

Those optional plug-ins are not part of the Eclipse SDK download:

  • Secure Hovers (simple HTML)


    Note: As of 3.5 this is no longer needed because JavaScript is disabled when showing HTML in hovers or in the Javadoc view.

    Since 3.2 Eclipse uses the SWT Browser widget to display HTML information in hovers. On some platforms (e.g. Windows) this widget has all browser features enabled, e.g. it might execute scripts that are inside the HTML content (see bug 228608 for details). Those who want to avoid this potential (but minimal) risk can download and install this optional plug-in which disables the Browser widget and displays the hovers as simple HTML.

    To install simply download the plug-in and save it into the <install_dir>/plugins (R3.2.x - R3.3.x) or <install_dir>/dropins (R3.4) directory.

Development Resources

The Development Resources show how to use Platform Text components.

What's Happening?

4.3 Development

  • Most active development goes into this stream which can be downloaded from the eclipse project download area.
  • The 4.3 plan is posted here.
  • The plan for the current M4 milestone is posted here.
  • The plans for the previous milestones can be found here.

R3.8 / 4.2

  • The current releases are R3.8 and R4.2 which are available on the download area.

R3.8 / 4.2 Maintenance

Information about R3.8 / 4.2 maintenance releases can be found here and builds can be downloaded from from the eclipse project download area.

Previous Releases

Information about previous releases can be found here.

Get Involved!

If you are interested in participating in the development of the Platform Text component, check out the developer's mailing list: platform-text-dev@eclipse.org. Chat with people there about your problems and interests, and find out what you can do to help.

For more detailed information, check out the Development Resources.