Thursday, August 20, 2015

Improved TextMate bundles integration and instant searches on Eclipse (LiClipse 2.3.0)

Yeap, LiClipse 2.3.0 is out now.

The main change in this release was a restructuring on how the parsing works...

This deserves some better explanation: in Eclipse, the default parsing structure is done by separating a document in many top-level partitions and later on those partitions are scanned to give syntax highlighting.

The issue here is that in LiClipse when parsing with TextMate rules, a single parse will provide all the information at once (top-level partitions and internal scopes in the partition), so, the code was restructured so that a single parse is done and the information is properly saved to be accessed later on, so, a single parse will provide the partitions, colors, outline, etc.

This means that LiClipse became even more responsive, especially when dealing with TextMate rules and the scope information is available to better support TextMate snippets for code-completion.

Also, the searching structure created on LiClipse 2.2.0 was ironed out (and its really pleasant getting instant searches even on big codebases).

Enjoy!