[barryodriscoll]

I’m not sure if this is the right place to be asking questions about developing eclipse plug-ins but I’ve already posted this question on the eclipse.org newsgrounds to no avail so I thought I’d try here.

As my final year project in my computer science degree I am developing an eclipse plug in. My plug-in is going to be a tool for helping in program comprehension. Instead of actively assisting the programmer in the job of reading source code my plug-in will first ask the programmer what the context of his current maintenance project and
then record any edits he makes to the file. This mapping will then be stored for future developers who are working on a similar maintenance project and can use the mapping to get a start up in trying to read the code. Its sorta like the comments you can attach to changes in a CVS repository but with more functionality and imbedded in the IDE.

I’m having difficulty trying to figure out how to change the background color of certain lines in the java editor so that I can tell the programmer which lines were changed in relation to a certain maintenance task. I was hoping you might be able to help me out with a few suggestions of classes to look at in eclipse or if its even possible to alter the background color of the eclipse java editor.

The classes I’ve found in the api which seem to point in the right direction are Painter or SytledText. StyledText has a setBackground method but it doesn’t appear to be something you can apply to the current source editor. IPainter can be constructed on ITextViewer which I’m guessing is a means of connecting it to the current text editor but I can only get ITextEditor from PlatformUI interface and can’t find a way of getting ITextViewer.

Any help advice on this problem would be really appricated.

[Riyad Kalla]

Moving to OT > Soft Dev

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