ETEE Frequently Asked Questions

General

Why these extensions?

I edit a lot of text with XML or xhtml markup - specifically, a lot of my Java code processes XML or uses XML configuration files, etc.  I also like to document my code, which means I include XML snippets in my Javadoc. I often paste sample XML into Javadoc or HTML and turn it into documentation... this means escaping or quoting the XML special characters.

I also use GNU Emacs a lot and for several years I have had Emacs Lisp to do these operations inside Emacs, I missed these capabilities in the Eclipse editors.

I particularly missed the feature in Emacs which allows you to run a command line filter over a text region - M-x shell-command-on-region . GNU Emacs came out of a Unix background, where the philosophy is to reuse rather than recreate such text processing utilities. So rather than reimplement the entire Unix command set in Emacs, Emacs simply lets you use such filters directly. It's pretty powerful, and once you're used to it, it's hard to get along without it. Similarly, rather than reimplement all this existing functionality in Eclipse, simply make it easier to access directly from the Eclipse editors - hence, this plug-in!

See Examples for some interesting examples of how ETEE may be used.

What other similar plug-ins exist?

I've not seen a plug-in which supports running a filter on the selected text; that is why I wrote this one. AnyEdit has some XML/text conversion but deals with national characters and has a different purpose. However, it works with many different editors/plug-ins (many of which I've not even tried, much less tested ETEE with. If you need ETEE's commands in one of these editors, use the mailing list (see below) to request an enhancement.

Who runs this project?

David Biesack is a Java programmer and a 20+ year Emacs user and now uses Eclipse quite a bit as well. David works at SAS Institute, where he is a Java, reuse, and best practices evangelist.

Who should I contact with questions?

Please use the eclipseexeditor-devuser mailing list for all questions. This way the entire community can benefit from the answers.

Can I help?

Yes! Just check out a copy from the project's Sourceforge CVS - it includes the Eclipse .project and .classpath settings, so it's easy to open a new project directly from CVS. Please try to follow the same naming and coding conventions as the existing code.