EPIC editor magic?

mannih2001 wrote on Fri Feb 29 12:33:28 CET 2008:

Hi,

one of the features of the epic editor that I really love is that it does
what I expect it to do (at least most of the time). That is especially true
for the delete-next-word command (Ctrl-Del). In EPIC this will delete any
white space before an actual word without touching the word itself. Perfect.


However, other Eclipse editors don't do that. They will delete the word
as well and I don't have any quick and easy way to get rid of the white
space. This is at least true on my plaform, using gtk2.

So I asked in the pydev forums recently why their editor would not give
me the desired behavior and part of the answer was that their editor simply
inherits the behavior from eclipse. Of course, this brings up the question
whether the EPIC editor is doing any special magic regarding the delete-next/previous-word
commands?


Regards,
Manni

jploski wrote on Fri Feb 29 18:57:37 CET 2008:

Unfortunately, the platform (workbench) doesn't provide enough functionality
for good word navigation independently of the syntax of a programming language
(how is a word defined, after all?). EPIC's code mimics the behavior of
the Java editor. Both EPIC and the Java editor contain extra code to implement
the behavior you expect compared to the "raw" platform (e.g., the plain
text editor).

Both EPIC's and Java editor's behavior is consistent with the other word
navigation actions (in this case, "go to the next word's beginning", CTRL-right).
If the other project(s) are not so consistent, that's a problem which they
should fix. You can also argue that the Java editor is the gold standard
to which all other editors should adhere unless there are important reasons
for deviating.