Eclipse Archive Utilities

Home  >>  Eclipse  >>  Eclipse Archive Utilities

Eclipse Archive Utilities

On March 15, 2012, Posted by , In Eclipse, With 2 Comments

A little while ago I started a side project to support working with (zip) archive files in the Eclipse IDE. Initially it was more meant to revive my plug-in development knowledge and play around with some technologies like Tycho or SWTBot. But in the end, I though it might be useful enough to share.

The plug-in extends the Project Explorer in that archive files can be expanded just like regular folders. Archive files can be extracted entirely or partially to locations in the workspace or file system. With the Open action, the content of an archive entry can be viewed in an editor.

From a Java developer’s point of view, the crux the the Project Explorer is, that it isn’t an equal replacement for the Package Explorer. When using working sets, the dynamic Other Projects working set is painfully missing. Not sure though how IDEs for other languages deal with this.

If, for whatever reason, the Project Explorer isn’t your primary view to manage development artifacts you can always press Alt+Shift+W on the current selection to show it in the Project Explorer. And from there on you can delve into the content of the archive file.

The short movie below will give you an impression of how the archive utilities work.

If you want to give it a try, the URL to the Eclipse software repository is
http://rherrmann.github.io/com.codeaffine.archive/repository
To install, choose Help -> Install New Software… from the Eclipse main menu. In the upcoming dialog, enter the above URL in the Work with field.

There is even a small homepage with some more information. The code is open source and is hosted on github.

See also  Democamp Slides

Several things like opening nested archive files, support for other archive- and compression-formats (e.g. tar, tar.gz), an Open with… action to open archive entries in a different editor are missing. Quite annoying is, that I haven’t brought key bindings for Open to work so far. If anyone knows how to reuse the F3 key binding from the standard open command, please reply to this forum post or leave a comment on this post.

Let me know what you think. If you are missing a feature or if you found a bug, please open an issue.

Rüdiger Herrmann
Follow me
Latest posts by Rüdiger Herrmann (see all)

2 Comments so far:

  1. Eric Rizzo says:

    Have you considered contributing this code to the Eclipse platform? Feature requests that are accompanied by complete and working code are generally well received.

    • Rüdiger Herrmann says:

      Eric,
      thanks for bringing up this idea. There are still some open issues which I think should be resolved before considering this feature complete. I am currently busy with other commitments so that I won’t be able to address them any time soon. If however someone is willing to drive the effort I am more than glad to assist. Please feel free to contact me if there is interest.

      Regards,
      Rüdiger