Saturday, August 18, 2007

Parts, drugs and Fullscreen

Fullscreen is often an eyecatcher - isn't it? ;)
But I didn't wrote that to annoy you but to tell that the SWT team (especially Kevin Barnes) just committed fullscreen support for SWT shells. I'm really happy that my patches - which were part of my Google Summer of Code project - found their new home in the Eclipse CVS.
If you're one of the lucky ones working with SWT HEAD or any of the upcoming N-builds you can do something like this in order to turn your shells into real fullscreen windows:

Display display = new Display();
final Shell shell = new Shell(display, SWT.SHELL_TRIM);

Button bFullscreen = new Button(shell, SWT.PUSH);
bFullscreen.setText("switch fullscreen");
bFullscreen.addSelectionListener(new SelectionAdapter() {
public void widgetSelected(SelectionEvent e) {
shell.setFullScreen(!shell.getFullScreen());
}
}


When running this little application and clicking the button, you'll get a fullscreen shell which covers the the whole space of your active screen.
As this a really nice-to-have feature of Eclipse, I'm currently working on a new command/handler/keybinding for the workbench to allow the user to switch the IDE into a fullscreen application.

Besides this there is another major task planned for my SoC project - Detached Windows. Sometimes hated, sometimes loved. I've to say that I really love them...but only my patched version which can hold serveral ViewStacks (folders of views) in one window. It could look like the on on the right.


As I really follow the term "eat your own dogfood", I'm working on my SoC project with two screens:
Screen 1: Eclipse IDE in fullscreen mode which covers everything else on that screen
Screen 2: a detached Window which allows me to arrange my views and folder just like the workbench window itself
Interested? Here is a picture of my current desktop (caution: ~400kb, 3360px*1050px):

6 comments:

Savino Sguera said...

Awesome! Great job man...

Daniel Bimschas said...

That's exactly what I was looking for! You wrote that you code made it's way into Eclipse CVS... will full screen mode be part of some next release?! Is there a plugin for it?

Also, I would love to have detached windows when using 2 screens!

Great Work!

sbackl said...

Full screen is fine if the support is there and any media is up to the challange, I wrote code to show certain images of b&q garden furniture and the images were not large enough however a friend wrote a program that manipulates the images clarity in full screen mode. It was quite amazing.

Anonymous said...

You wrote that you code made it's way into Eclipse CV which is precisely what i needed!to turn shells into real fullscreen windows

This is brilliant i have been looking for it all over!
Thank you so much!

Full screen is great especially with support.

-Kev
Compaq Laptop Parts

Sanne said...

Hi, people is using Eclipse 3.4 now and this post is quite old... does it mean I could code in fullscreen mode? is there a shortcut?

Anonymous said...

Sometimes I try to have a full screen and all of a sudden it gets shorter and I don't know why. I can't get in the system well and it's urgent because I'm going to buy my dose of Viagra Online.