Mike Benner: CFEclipse Tag Insight

CFEclipse Tag Insight

Mar 25 by Michael Benner

OK, so on the group today has been a discussion about tag insight/auto complete. A) How do I shut if off? and B) Why would you? First the easy part, to shut it off go to Windows->Preferences->CFEclipse->Editor->Delay Insight. Set that value to something high (it is in milliseconds) and there you go.

Now I am in the A camp for a few reasons that

I will reiterate (if you read my post on the list skip this).

I like the tag insight, especially when using a tag that I hardly use and my head is rusty on syntax and attributes. The problem with CFEclipse is the insight pops up and takes control. Now I know this is for auto complete, but more times than not it is in my way and takes me longer to deal with than if I just typed it out.

I believe it was Rob on the list that had a great idea, a live pane (like snippets, methods, etc but live) as you type that does the tag insight and is unobtrusive. I really like this idea and think tying it to the dictionary or live docs would be great.

Another solution would be to not have the insight take control and force you to do something other than just hitting [space] to use the selected item, so that when I hit [space] I don't have to delete something that inadvertently got inserted. I am even ok with have to make that change in prefs myself.

This brings up another point, we kind of came to a quick consensus that this would be a welcome feature, but who would code it. I like the feature enough I would love to do it, but alas, I have no idea how. I am going to look into it a little (and if any of you know how but don't have time, please point me in the right direction), but more importantly it just re-illustrated to me the effort that goes into open source development and how helpless I sometimes feel when asked if I would do it. Passion only gets you 90% there.

So please share your resources for plugin development and any insight you might have and I will share my time to TRY and venture into that world.

Comments (2) | 362 Views | Tags: Eclipse, Coldfusion, Programming

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Michael,
One thing that I recently discovered, that I love, is just what you suggested when you said "Another solution would be to not have the insight take control and force you to do something other than just hitting [space] to use the selected item, so that when I hit [space] I don't have to delete something that inadvertently got inserted". If you set your Insight delay to some high number (like 9999), then you can use Ctrl+space to trigger insight.

The only thing I have found is that, at least with my installation, it only seems to work on closed tags.

So if your current line looks like:

<cfapplication name=”My App”

It won’t work, but if you close the tag:

<cfapplication name=”My App” />

And then go back into it, it does work.

# Posted By Jason Dean | 3/25/08 9:21 PM