Details
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Type:
New Feature
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Status:
Resolved
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Priority:
Major
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Resolution: Fixed
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Affects Version/s: 2.0.1Release
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Fix Version/s: 2.0.2Release
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Component/s: Editor
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Labels:None
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Environment:Mac OS 10.6.3
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Patch Submitted:Yes
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Number of attachments :
Description
The Eclipse Java editor has a feature (and setting) "When pasting, adjust indentation", which seems to be turned on by default. Because the Groovy editor does not support this feature, our developers always encountered inexplicable problems when pasting Groovy code, and reasoned that pasting in Groovy is broken. Since this is a very handy feature, it would be great if the Groovy editor supported this feature as well if turned on in the Java settings.
Example:
def doit() {
def x = 10
def y = 20
}
Select the two lines with variable definitions starting from column 1, then cut. Move the cursor after {, hit return, and paste. In the Java editor, the two lines will be indented as before. In the Groovy editor, the result is this:
def doit() {
def x = 10
def y = 20
}
Activity
Hi Peter,
So what I ended up doing is the strategy described earlier, it uses the same logic as what's being used for "newline" presses. It applies this to adjust the indentation for the first two lines, computes the "movement" of the second line, and moves all subsequent lines relative (i.e indent or outdents by the same distance as the 2nd line was moved).
There are some weaknesses in the implementation that I know of.
Mainly the newline strategy is not 100% reliable, so when that fails it will move the code by the wrong distance.
Also the smart paste currently is only implemented to work when pasting on empty lines. If that turns out to be an issue I could work on generalizing it.
There may be other potential limitations / bugs that I don't know about.
I'd be interested to hear any complaints, both about the gravity of the "known issues" or other unexpected bugs. These are particularly nice if they come with specific examples that I can try to fix. (e.g. your posted example in this issue became one of my first test cases 
A patch is attached. Unfortunately, it looks like our build script that publishes snapshot builds has not been working ever since codehaus has reconfigured the bamboo servers. So it may be some time before a snapshot build is actually available.
I'll keep this issue open and post a message when I've seen a successful build/snapshot go through, so you know when there's actually something that can be tried out.
Hi Peter,
Thanks for submitting this. I'm aware of the problem. But it is good to know what issues people care about.
Right now when you paste text into the Groovy editor it simply pastes your text "as is".
Unfortunately it is not as easy as just turning on smart paste features. The smart paste features inherited
from JDT just don't work right when you paste in Groovy code. So I've turned this off completely. I figured
that it is better to just paste the text "as is" than to have rather impredictable incorrect "magic" adjustment
to indentation. Paste may not magically adjust indentation now, but at least, in some sense it is predictable
since it pastes exactly the text that was copied (including spaces).
Properly implementing smart paste as it works in Java will be tricky. But I hope to do it eventually.
In the mean time, perhaps there are some simple things that could be done that are less sophisticated but may help.
For example, we could try to preserve indentation of pasted text minus leading white space, relative to the paste point
(rather than preserve text as is, what we do now).
I think this would not be as hard to implement as full on autoindentation on paste, would be fairly predictable,
and would put the code in the right place if the following conditions are met:
I could experiment with that a little if you think this might help alleviate the complaints of your developers.