Workbench key bindings
The workbench defines many keyboard accelerators for invoking common actions
with the keyboard. In early versions of the platform, plug-ins could
define the accelerator key to be used for their action when the action was
defined. However, this strategy can cause several problems:
- Different plug-ins may define the same accelerator key for actions that are
not related.
- Plug-ins may define different accelerator keys for actions that are
semantically the same.
- Plug-ins may define accelerator keys that later conflict with the workbench
(as the workbench is upgraded).
In order to alleviate these problems, the platform defines a configurable key
binding strategy that is extendable by plug-ins. It solves the problems
listed above and introduces new capabilities:
- The user can control which key bindings should be used.
- Plug-ins can define key bindings that emulate other tools that may be
familiar to users of the plug-in.
- Plug-ins can define contexts for key bindings so that they are only active
in certain situations.
The basic strategy is that plug-ins use commands to define
semantic actions. Commands are simply declarations of an action and its
associated category. These commands can then be associated with key
bindings, actions, and handlers. Commands do not define an implementation
for the action. When a
plug-in defines an action for an editor, action set, or view, the action can
specify that it is an implementation of one of these commands.
This allows semantically similar actions to be associated with the same command.
Once a command is defined, a key binding may be defined that
references the command. The key binding defines the key sequence that
should be used to invoke the command. A key binding may reference a
scheme which is used to group key bindings into different named
schemes that the user may activate via the
Preferences dialog.
This is all best understood by walking through the workbench and looking at
how commands and key bindings are declared. We'll look at all of this from
the point of view of defining key bindings for existing workbench actions.
See the
org.eclipse.ui.bindings
section for simple binding scenarios and the
Basic workbench extension points using commands
section for using the new command framework.