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Feature Request? [message #1797286]

Mon, 29 October 2018 14:31

Reinhardt Christiansen

Messages: 73
Registered: March 2010

Member

Where can I submit a feature request for Java?

What I have in mind should require very little effort from anyone and should also be uncontroversial.

I have multiple copies of Eclipse 2018-2019 installed on my Windows desktop. While the full-sized desktop icons can be told apart via their captions, the smaller icons which appear in the Windows taskbar cannot. This causes confusion when multiple instances of Eclipse are open at the same time. You have to click on each one until you finally find the instance you want. Now, this is not a huge productivity drain; it only takes a couple of seconds per instance to find which one I actually want to work with at that moment but seconds add up to significant time after a while. This wasted time could be avoided if the taskbar icons could be easily distinguished.

A couple of obvious approaches come to mind:
- put a small distinguishing letter on the taskbar icon for each different version of Eclipse, such as a "P" for a PHP version and a "J" for a Java version
- colour-code the icons so that, for instance, the "globe" (or the stripes) for the PHP version is green with the Java version being red. (I'm not trying to state a preference for using green for PHP and red for Java, those are just examples).

I can't think of any reason anyone would object to visually distinguishing the icons and the effort to do so should be minimal; just create additional versions of the taskbar icons. (Of course, for consistency sake, it would make sense to make the desktop icons mirror the taskbar icons which slightly increases the amount of work.)

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Re: Feature Request? [message #1797346 is a reply to message #1797286]

Tue, 30 October 2018 07:37

Ed Merks

Messages: 33140
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

Note that there is a preference that I use for a similar purpose. Window -> Preferences -> General -> Workspace -> Show workspace name. Whatever label you put in there will be the label shown on the title bar and hence in the task bar. This way I can have many workspaces/eclipse-instances running and can easily distinguish them. Mostly I have many installations of the same product so distinguishing the icons would not help at all; some products do have their own icon but most just use the Eclipse global.

Ed Merks
Professional Support: https://www.macromodeling.com/

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Re: Feature Request? [message #1797374 is a reply to message #1797346]

Tue, 30 October 2018 12:52

Reinhardt Christiansen

Messages: 73
Registered: March 2010

Member

Thanks for that tip, Ed. That approach simplifies the task of telling which Eclipse you are in once you've clicked on a particular task bar icon.

Is it still possible to take the other approach where I could add the various PHP and HTML features to my Java instance of Eclipse so that I could do *both* from within the same Eclipse? That's what I did in my previous installation of Eclipse since it seemed simpler overall. Or have things been re-engineered so that each installation of Eclipse is only ONE of the various languages, like Java, PHP, C++, etc.?

On the broader topic of feature requests, I'd love to see a change to Snippets too. I've just discovered them and find it a very useful feature. I'm busy writing a bunch of them so that I can quickly write the code to determine aspects of the current date, like the weekday name or the year. As I've been doing so, I found one significant deficiency in the existing functionality: there is no way to copy and then alter an existing snippet. It would really improve my productivity in writing snippets if I could copy an existing snippet in the same snippet library and then simply edit my copy to make a slightly different snippet that does something else.

For example, one of my snippets returns the full name of the current month and I'd like to make another snippet that returns the short version of the current month name (e.g. Oct instead of October). If I could copy the snippet that gets the full month name, I'd only need 30 seconds to modify the copy. Instead, I need to spend several minutes retyping almost exactly what I had in the original snippet.

Is there a way that users of Eclipse can propose feature requests? I understand that making the request is no guarantee that it will be added and that even if it is added, it may take a fairly long time before we see the feature. And maybe someone has already proposed this change and it's already in development. I'd just like to know what the process is for submitting feature requests in general.

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Re: Feature Request? [message #1797396 is a reply to message #1797374]

Tue, 30 October 2018 15:21

Ed Merks

Messages: 33140
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

Yes, it's pretty much possible to install all features into a single IDE and to use that one IDE with multiple different workspaces.

Yes, you can open Bugzillas for this purpose:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/enter_bug.cgi

You need to determine the most appropriate product and component. You should set the Important to Enhancement when suggesting a new feature rather than reporting something that's buggy.

I expect it's highly unlikely someone will implement thing for you. You should consider contributing it...

Ed Merks
Professional Support: https://www.macromodeling.com/

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