Re: [cdt-dev] Refactoring idea

[Mirko Stocker <me@xxxxxxxx>]

Dear Alec

> I cannot believe that all that time it has been there. I assumed toggle
> function was accidentally placed in the refactoring menu and just folded
> a function. How daft of me!

Don't feel bad, I think that discoverability is a general problem that IDEs 
have. After almost 10 years of working with Eclipse I still discover new 
features :-)

 
> A "move to/from namespace" would also be nice, with a choice of a
> "using", absolute specifier and a relative specifier.

Our (I'm a co-worker of Thomas and Lukas) CUTE Plug-in [1] comes with 
(experimental) namespace refactorings. It doesn't do moving but it makes it 
easier to switch between qualified names and using directives [2]. 


> Eclipse plugins have always interested me, is the refactoring system
> "difficult"?

There are some hurdles, for example, you will be working with CDT's abstract 
syntax tree, which might look a bit overwhelming if you're not used to it. But 
there are also many things that are cleverly hidden away, for example, 
generating the source code is much easier than one might expect. Another 
colleague of ours, Michael Rüegg, recently gave a presentation on the "Eclipse 
CDT refactoring overview and internals" [3], you might want to take a look at 
it if you consider contributing to the refactorings.


Cheers

Mirko


[1] http://www.cute-test.com/
[2] http://www.cute-test.com/projects/cute/wiki/Namespactor_-_namespace_refactoring_support
[3]http://wiki.eclipse.org/images/b/be/PTPUserDev2012_Ruegg_Refactoring.pdf‎

-- 
Mirko Stocker | m1stocke@xxxxxx
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