See below a few question, and then some ideas.
> the core of the Generic Text Editor is not dependent on E3.
Can you please elaborate what you specifically mean by this? I'm not a e4 user myself (not really interested in it for my IDE-related work since e3 just does the job quite well), so I'm genuinly curious about what specific criteria are to check to claim something is dependent on e3 or not.
Are there already stories of the Platform TextEditor working on plain E4 without E3? As long as it's not there, then we cannot really imagine moving downstream to the Generic Editor.
> trying to remove E3 dependencies from the Generic Text
Editor.
> [...]
> I browsed the code of the "ExtensionBasedTextEditor"
I confirm this is probably quite hard, I guess the type hierarchy of the editor itself (and it means a lot as parent are providing a lot of the value) is full of e3 APIs. But maybe I'm wrong on the type stack for the Generic Editor is already ready.
but we can
gain a lot from this.
Can you please give example of use-case that E4 enables easily that are impossible or very hard to implement with e3 APIs?
> The Generic Text Editor may be a good starting point: it has a lot
of services to interact with and it will be natural to utilize OSGi
services and E4 approach.
If you want to add support for OSGi Services additionally to extension point in the current Generic Editor, that would be welcome, since it wouldn't reduce the feature set nor break backward compatibility.
About using the e4 approach, then it seems to me you mean "ability to load extensions with e4 annotations". It also seems like something that can be done, if it's not already there.
Can a pure E4 generic editor be backward-compatible with the current one (read extensions and process them similarly, and have the same feature set)? If yes, then I would recommend migrating the porting Generic Editor rather than creating a new one. If we have both, then it's twice more maintenance cost, the IDE will keep the legacy one that just works for it and both editors will ultimately diverge, and given the priorities of the community regarding text edition (mostly the IDE), there will be new features in the current Generic Editor that won't be implemented in the pure-e4 one and the pure-e4 one will get obsolete and will conclude as an expensive unsuccessful experiment.
For this reason, I'm personally -1 to have Platform hosting a new editor for this, however, I'm +1 in making the Generic Editor as much e4-friendly as possible (as long as it doesn't have any negative impact).
Cheers,
