What's New in Eclipse 4.28

Here are descriptions of some of the changes of interest to plug-in developers made to the Eclipse Platform and SWT for the 4.27 release of Eclipse.

New features oriented towards end-users of the platform can be viewed in the What's New section of the Eclipse Platform User Guide.

Platform Changes

Command Icons in e4 It is now possible to set command icons in the e4 model using the Eclipse 4 Model Editor. Previously this was only possible for e3 commands using the org.eclipse.ui.commandImages extension point.
Influence "Ignore Whitespace" in Compare The "Ignore White Space" context menu action in the Eclipse Compare editor ignores all whitespace, including what may be semantically significant whitespace. For example, in Java a whitespace difference in a string literal is semantically significant while trailing whitespace is not.

It is now possible to hook into the ignore-whitespace algorithm by providing an implementation of the new IIgnoreWhitespaceContributor interface. Return an instance of this interface in your override of the createIgnoreWhitespaceContributor method in your sub-class of TextMergeViewer.

Your implementation is called for each detected whitespace difference when "Ignore White Space" is enabled. Your implementation can decide whether that whitespace difference should be ignored or not.

Onboarding information in editor area The editor area now shows the most important and useful commands and their key binding when no editor is open. The information shown is dependent on the currently active perspective. Perspective have to provide these details by providing an extension to the org.eclipse.ui.perspectiveExtensions extension point. Provide and image in the editorOnboardingImage attribute and an short text in the editorOnboardingText attribute of the perspectiveExtension element. Up to 5 commands can be provided in the editorOnboardingCommand. For more details refer to the extension point's documentation. The org.eclipse.ui.resourcePerspective perspective can be used as an example.
Enhanced IPath creation and conversion The IPath interface now provides various static factory methods to create IPath instances from portable, Linux or Windows path strings as well as from java.io.File or java.nio.file.Path objects. You can now create an IPath completely without referring to org.eclipse.core.runtime.Path.
Furthermore IPath.toPath() was added, which converts an IPath to a equivalent java.nio.file.Path object.