Extending Eclipse's JavaEditor (to act like Vim/change KeyListener)

Question

Introduction a.k.a. what do I intend to do

feel free to skip this part, no real information is comprised in here

Because of the lack of a good, free (as in speech) vim-Mode for the otherwise excellent JavaEditor in Eclipse(3.4), I'm thinking about writing one. The available solutions are:

• ViPlugin: commercial and not good (e.g. no vim text-objects, such as daW)
• VimPlugin: new editor, not the power of the built in JavaEditor
• see SO: Painless integration of Eclipse with Vim? : nothing really good turned up

(However feel free to mention other solutions than the ones above which could help me.)

In my opinion, it's the wrong way of writing a completely new editor based on TextEditor, because you will then loose the cool features the standard JavaEditor gives you for free (such as 'organize imports', 'refactor menu', ...).

I'm thinking of a 'skin' to the normal JavaEditor which behaves like vim, everything else should be unchanged.

Now the questions

• How can I detect if a IWorkbenchPart given by IPartListener.partActivated() is the JavaEditor?
• How can I then replace JavaEditor's KeyListener; something like the ITextViewerExtension.prependVerifyKeyListener is needed?
• Is this a good way to go on?

Answer 1

I use the VI plugin from here (note: this link is down as of the time of writing and I'm hoping it'll be back soon). This works very well indeed and ties in very well with the coding/refactoring capabilities of Eclipse (see this answer).

So you may want to try that link (if it comes up!) before you embark on engineering your own solution :-)

Answer 2

I am the developer of something you might be looking for. It is still under heavy development and does not have all features you are looking for, but I am working hard on it and I am always open for feature and enhancement requests.

The plugin is called Vrapper. It is FOSS and follows the principles you describe, although I don't think it is much more powerful than the ViPlugin at the moment. But as I said, I am constantly working on it and try to respond fast to feature requests. :-)

Answer 3

I try Vrapper, it's comfortable. got vim function in eclipse, naver lost original function