[isabelle-dev] NEWS: Dockable window "Find"

[Andrius Velykis]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 12:25 PM, Makarius <makarius at sketis.net> wrote:

> The layers 2+3 offer extensive means of customization.
>> To come back to the above example, one does, of course, not set
>> StyleRanges on the SWT widget oneself. One registers with the
>> JFace TextViewer's syntax highlighting mechanism and produces
>> them on demand -- for instance from the semantic markup offered
>> by Isabelle/Scala.
>>
>
> Again: Why not make this practical, and tell Andrius Velykis about it? He
> has already Isabelle/Eclipse that is more than just a proof of concept or a
> small demo, so it deserves to catch up with the quality standards of
> Isabelle/jEdit.


I am aware of the syntax highlighting capabilities in Eclipse. In
Isabelle/Eclipse I am interfacing the APIs and frameworks provided by
Eclipse in the majority of cases. In other cases, such as tokenisation, the
Isabelle/Scala libraries are used just like in Isabelle/jEdit (rather than
writing custom rules for Eclipse tokenisers). This is currently implemented
so that a wrapper is provided on top of the Isabelle/Scala tokeniser that
adheres to Eclipse's interfaces.

I have to admit that the quality standards are a bit behind in comparison
to Isabelle/jEdit. However, this is mostly the lack of time spent on adding
specific features rather than having implementation troubles. I am aware of
the `rise` field in StyleRange to render sub-/superscript, it's just that I
haven't gone around to doing the whole control-symbols support yet. There
is an open issue that tracks this though (
https://github.com/andriusvelykis/isabelle-eclipse/issues/8)! I do hope to
achieve parity with Isabelle/jEdit once I am finished with writing up my
PhD thesis, which is hopefully soon enough :)

Isabelle/Eclipse is not there because Eclipse is better or something. I am
not aiming at platform wars - Isabelle/Eclipse has been born out of the
fact that I like Eclipse and I wanted to build tools on top of Eclipse and
Isabelle. I do hope that people who also like Eclipse can contribute or
build upon Isabelle/Eclipse so that the project would grow. Furthermore, I
think that having different UIs on top of Isabelle/Scala can help with
better APIs and more general implementation there.

I would also agree with Holger: writing UIs should be encouraged for formal
tools. The popularity of Eclipse as platform for different IDEs does help
with implementing Isabelle/Eclipse. There are a number of editors to use as
a reference for own implementations. Even if Scala is your language of
choice, there is the Scala IDE code to look for implementation hints (
https://github.com/scala-ide/scala-ide).Furthermore, Eclipse tools such as
Plug-in Spy helps with finding classes that implement features of the IDE.
For example, I can click on a button within my Eclipse and see what is the
class that provides implementation for this button.

In the end, I am still playing catch-up with Isabelle/jEdit as well as all
the goodies in Eclipse (the JDT editor has some nifty features to copy
from). So props to Makarius for developing a nice PIDE and I hope
Isabelle/Eclipse will be as nice in the near future :)

Best regards,
Andrius
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