Visual Eclipse.NET?
On those crazy days where Microsoft presents a session on EclipseCon, and JavaOne, how would be if Eclipse and Visual Studio.NET were “merged”?
Some time ago, I started investigating the presentations API.
It is available since Eclipse 3.0, but it is not a very “popular” API. There is no documentation, no tutorials, no articles, and the only thing I found was some examples lost in Eclipse CVS.
The presentations API enable us to customize the look and feel of views and editors in Eclipse.
I started a project in SourceForge. The first release from this project was inspired by the idea in the start of this post. It is a presentation that mimics the look and feel from Visual Studio.NET.
Personnaly, I think VS.NET workbench looks better than Eclipse in some aspects, but it has a lot of usability problems, like:
- Editor bar: it is very hard to see where is some file.
- Navigation through editors and views: the scroll buttons are very confusing.
The intend of this plugin was to emulate VS.NET workbench, so these annoyances were replicated as much as possible 
It is not fully functional nor fully VS.NET compliant yet:
- Ctrl+E does not work because apparently it is handled by presentation; it is not a “global“ action like Ctrl+F6.
- There is no “pin button“ on view‘s title bar, because I found no way to turn a IPresentablePart into a fast view. I think this functionality was not exposed in the public API.
- In VS.NET, the view tabs are “stretched” when you resize them horizontally. I think this is one of the dumbest usability bugs in VS.NET, and it is somewhat difficult to implement, so I decided to create scroll buttons like in the editor bar.
To install, just drop the jar in the plugins directory of a Eclipse 3.1 installation (yes, it uses the new 3.1‘s feature: deploy plugins as jars), and select “VS Presentation” in Window > Preferences > General > Appearance > Current Presentation. Restart Eclipse.
Screenshots:
Visual Studio.NET:
Eclipse with VS Presentation plugin:
