Pydev 1.4.5 released

First, I'd like to thank those that took the time to test Pydev before the official release (some bugs were fixed because of those reports).

This release had quite some work on the Python grammar error handling. The major difference for Pydev users is that operations that require a valid AST to be performed should be more reliable -- and a bit faster -- when syntax errors are present in the code (e.g.: showing the outline; requesting a code-completion -- previously some text-manipulations were performed to make a valid AST, but this was not very reliable and also required more resources, as it tried to reparse the whole buffer after each text manipulation).

The code formatter also had some work. Particularly, four requests that popped up now and then are now available:

- A context menu is provided for folders so that all files under it can be (recursively) formatted
- The code-formatting can be automatically applied when saving the editor
- A new line can be added at the end of files
- Whitespaces can be trimmed

One other area I believe deserves some attention is the Pydev Package Explorer, which was improved so that working sets can be shown as top-level items and folders without '__init__.py' have a regular folder icon (instead of a package icon).

And as regularly, bug-fixes and other minor features were made available (see the Pydev homepage for more details)

Extended VS Presentation

Over the last days I've been trying a new skin to Eclipse:

http://code.google.com/p/skin4eclipse

and it's pretty nice. It did have some minor quirks, like not being able to use ctrl+page up/down to traverse the editors and some other minors, but as it's open source, I was able to add the things I was missing -- which have already been incorporated by Andrei, who is the author of the plugin (those were changed when the current release was 1.5.1, so, it'll be only available in a later release).

It's pretty nice that it keeps track of the editors that were recently closed (so, you can reopen them) and it maintains the order of the tabs when the editors are closed (a.k.a: MRU bug). Also, it uses less space for the editor name, so, you can see more opened tabs at the same time.

The colors and fonts can also be configured (for me the default colors drew too much attention to the titlebar).

The only thing I still wasn't able to figure is if the presentation can prevent detached tabs to be closed with ESC (that's something that really bothers me, because I usually leave a detached tab for the console in a separate monitor, and now and then those end up being closed accidentally with ESC) -- but the default presentation has the same issue (I'm not even sure if there's a way around that).

Update: I've just sent a patch to add an option to prevent ESC from closing detached editors :)