Chapter 8. Editors

Editors are the primary mechanism for users to create and modify resources (e.g., files). Eclipse provides some basic editors such as text and Java source editors, along with some more complex multipage editors such as the plug-in manifest editor. Products that need to present their own editors can use the same extension points used by the built-in Eclipse editors. This chapter discusses creating a new Properties editor, hooking up commands to it, and linking the editor to the Outline view.

Editors must implement the org.eclipse.ui.IEditorPart interface. Typically, editors are subclasses of org.eclipse.ui.part.EditorPart and thus indirectly subclasses of org.eclipse.ui.part.WorkbenchPart, inheriting much of the behavior needed to implement the IEditorPart interface (see Figure 8-1).