| SideKick plugin user's guide | (July 5 2012) |
Table of Contents
The SideKick plugin provides a dockable in which other plugins can display buffer structure.
>> displays the current buffer's structure in a dockable window. This window is floating by default, but it can be docked into the view 2 ways.
Choosing a docking area from the docking menu (a little arrow in the upper left corner of each floating dockable)
Go to the pane of the dialog box
On the top of the window, you will see a combobox which lists all installed SideKick parsers. You can switch to another parser temporarily for a buffer by selecting it from the combo box.
The SideKick plugin can automatically parse your buffer depending on various events, such as: Buffer Switch, Buffer Save, or on the fly (after it is idle for a period of time). The last option is rarely used since it can eat up CPU time, so it is disabled by default.
>> is a checkbox menu item that toggles on-the-fly parsing, for the current buffer only.
You can also manually parse a buffer by clicking on the "Parse" button in the Sidekick dockable, or through a keyboard shortcut, if you bind Sidekick's "parse buffer" action to a keystroke. [1]
The current buffer can be parsed at any other time by clicking the parse button in the window, or by invoking the >> command.
A popup menu is available in JDK 1.5 which appears when you right-click the "Parse" button. From there, you can set some auto-parse options without going to the plugin options.
SideKick supports what are called "Mode Options". Certain properties can be set on an edit-mode basis, such as the SideKick parser, tree expansion depth, etc. Other plugins (such as CtagsSideKick) added their own optionpane to this dialog, via the services API.
Also at the top of the window is a "Filter" box. Entering text into the box will cause the tree to collapse to show only those items in the tree whose names contain the text in the filter box. This makes it easy to quickly locate items in the tree. By default, clicking on an item in the tree clears the filter, but this can be changed in the SideKick plugin option settings by using the "Filter persists after tree selection" checkbox.
You don't have to click into the filter box to begin typing. As long as SideKick has focus, keystrokes are automatically sent to the box to make locating items even faster.
Any errors found while parsing the buffer are sent to the ErrorList plugin, which means they are highlighted in the text area, and shown in the >> window. See the documentation for the ErrorList plugin for details.
Clicking on a node in the tree will move the caret to its location in the buffer; conversely, moving the caret in the buffer will select the corresponding node.
Shift-clicking on a node will select that node in the text area. Alt-clicking on a node will narrow the text area display to that node.
If SideKick is docked into the current view, hovering the mouse over a node will display its attributes in the status bar.
>> moves the caret to start of the structure element ("asset").
>> moves the caret to start of the next asset.
>> selects the asset at the caret position.
Up and Down arrow keys let you navigate between sibling nodes, or to parents/children of exploded nodes.
Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down keys go to previous/next asset.
Right and Left arrow keys expand and collapse tree nodes.
SideKick can optionally display the structure of the buffer in a toolbar, using one or more combo-boxes. This option is useful where screen real-estate is important and the tree takes too much of the screen. To use this option, select >> >. By default, a single combo-box is shown, which can be used to jump to various positions inside the buffer.
There is also an option to show a separate check-box for each level in the SideKick tree. To use this option, select >> >.
To make the combo-box (or multiple combo-boxes) show the asset where the caret is currently located, select >> >.
The SideKick plugin adds a new "sidekick" fold handler that folds the buffer according to the structure tree. See the jEdit user's guide for general details about folding.
>> hides all text except that of the asset at the caret location. This works in any folding mode, not just the "sidekick" mode.
A completion popup can be shown at any time by invoking the >> command. Each plugin that uses SideKick implements its own specific completion behavior; see the plugin documentation for details.
Table of Contents
By itself the SideKick plugin is not very useful; it relies on other plugins to provide buffer structure information. This chapter gives a brief overview of how it's done.
First you will also need to add a dependency for the SideKick plugin in your plugin's property file:
plugin.MyPlugin.depend.n=plugin sidekick.SideKickPlugin 0.1
Note that you must replace n with the
appropriate number, as dependency properties must have consecutive numbers.
All SideKick plugin classes are in the sidekick package;
you will need to add import statements where appropriate.
Parser instances must be registered using the
services.xml file. With this, you define a service which
returns a derived instance of
SideKickParser
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE SERVICES SYSTEM "services.dtd">
<SERVICES>
<SERVICE CLASS="sidekick.SideKickParser" NAME="xml">
new xml.parser.SAXParserImpl();
</SERVICE>
</SERVICES>
SideKickParser
is an abstract class. The constructor takes one string parameter. This string is used in several properties:
sidekick.parser.
- specifies a human-readable label for the parser, shown in status messages. name.label
Your derived parser class should return this same name from the getName() function.
mode.
- properties of this form are used to associate a parser with an edit mode.
mode.sidekick.parser
For example, the XML plugin, which used to provide two SideKickParser
implementations, had these properties:
sidekick.parser.xml.label=XML mode.xml.sidekick.parser=xml mode.xsl.sidekick.parser=xml sidekick.parser.html.label=HTML mode.asp.sidekick.parser=html mode.coldfusion.sidekick.parser=html mode.html.sidekick.parser=html mode.jhtml.sidekick.parser=html mode.jsp.sidekick.parser=html mode.php.sidekick.parser=html mode.shtml.sidekick.parser=html mode.sgml.sidekick.parser=html mode.velocity.sidekick.parser=html
The
SideKickParser
has one abstract method that all
subclasses must implement:
public
SideKickParsedData parse
( | Buffer buffer , |
DefaultErrorSource errorSource
); |
The errorSource is an instance of a class provided by the
ErrorList plugin; consult its documentation for
details.
The method is called from a thread, so care must be taken to access the
buffer in a thread-safe manner; the API documentation for the
Buffer class describes how this is done.
Your implementation of the parse() method should create and return
an instance of
SideKickParsedData . Its constructor of the takes one parameter, which is the file name (to be shown at the root of the structure tree). Your method should
add structure elements to the root field of the instance.
root is an instance of Java's DefaultMutableTreeNode class,
and is given an initial value by the SideKickParsedData constructor.
getPanel() . Some SideKick parsers, such as CtagsSideKick, offer an additional toolbar to provide a convenient interface to change certain mode options such as sort by, and group by. They achieve this by overriding the getPanel() method of SideKickParser.
Your derived instance of SideKickParser can implement additional methods to tell Sidekick that your parser supports completions.
/* @return true if plugin supports completion */
public boolean supportsCompletion();
/* @return true if we show completions after a period of inactivity. */
public boolean canCompleteAnywhere() ;
/* @return a list of characters which trigger completion immediately. */
public String getInstantCompletionTriggers();
/* @return all completions at a given caret position for this
editpane */
public SideKickCompletion complete(EditPane editPane, int caret)
If your SideKickParser does support completion, the actual
brains of the plugin goes in the last method, complete(),
which must construct an instance of
SideKickCompletion, given an EditPane and a caret position.
The constructor for SideKickCompletion accepts a list (or array) of possible values, these are the values that are displayed in the dropdown.
This is an abstract class, so you'll need to derive a specific implementation. You may want to override the 'insert(int)' method to
support language specifics, like "dot" completion.
How you actually create the completion depends on the specific language and support classes, and the information provided by the parser for the current file.
Adding a Help tooltip to the CompletionPopup window and methods to the CompletinoInfo for getting/setting help.
Click here to see the detailed changes.