Mylyn WikiText, Eclipse Galileo Feature #4

As I mentioned yesterday, tools such as the Memory Analyzer demonstrates just how dominant Eclipse is in the IDE space. And while Eclipse has many useful tools, nothing has changed the face of the IDE as much as the Mylyn project. Mylyn is more than just a cool plug-in for Eclipse, it completely changes the way developers work, bringing your productivity to a whole new level.

On the way back from EclipseCon, I had the privilege of sitting next to David Green, one of the Mylyn committers and the developer behind the Mylyn WikiText tool, number 4 on my Galileo Top 10 List.

Like all good Eclipse technology, Mylyn WikiText is both an extensible framework and an exemplary tool. The tool provides:

• Editor for wiki files
• Mylyn task editor integration
• Ant Tasks for processing wiki text file
• API

The Task Editor integration is probably the most noticeable use of WikiText. Mylyn users can now use WikiText markup directly in their task editor providing easier to understand bug reports.  For example, you can take a rather bland bug report:

And turn it into:

In addition to the markup, Wikitext supports a number of editing features including spellchecking, and content assist.

David’s Wikitext tool can be used outside Mylyn too to author arbirary text file and generate HTML, Docbook or eve Eclipse help content.

In addition to Wikitext, Mylyn has a whole host of new features. Thank-you David for Wikitext, and congratulations Mik and the rest of the Mylyn team for another successful release.