Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Wishing for TextPad bookmarks in Eclipse ...

There's one feature of TextPad that's just wonderfully convenient and helpful. It's called bookmarked lines.

You can mark lines by search (meaning by regexes), you can cut or copy marked lines, go forward/backward to next marked line, see them visually of course, and do other similar things.

What's the point? It means you don't need to drop down to a shell for things like grep or such like. They're really nice, actually. I used them just constantly when I was regularly on TextPad. I can't say enough nice things about them, really.

Please, please, please, please, please could someone put them in Eclipse? (Sorry for being a beggar rather than a helper.)

If Eclipse weren't already too complicated, I'd recommend an easy swap technique between different bookmark categories. Sometimes I would want to remember certain markings when temporarily moving to others. One option is to open the same contents multiple times (such as by copy and paste to a new document), but that was a pain really. But I'm afraid that anyone in Eclipse land would make a horror out of trying to manage multiple marker categories. So just one would be great for now.

And as another point, current Eclipse bookmarks are _nowhere_ near as good as TextPad's, despite a superficial similarity. But they could perhaps be improved to provide real service.

Thanks in advance!