Nowadays a textual editor is not just an editable document. Many informations have been provided to the user in order to get improved editing performances. It is quite common to find textual editor with coloring syntax, auto-completion and outline. These three items working together usually makes a good textual editor. That is the reason why the Kermeta platform provides such an editor. Below, you can find the global view of the Kermeta editor.

Figure 2.1. The Kermeta Textual Editor

To develop faster and faster, some nice helpfull tools now are usual. One of them is the auto-completion. According to a context, a list of item will be proposed. Using the arrows key and the carriage return key, you can select quickly and easily the item you want. The important thing is that, the list of item is calculated in order to only propose some relevant items. The figure below shows the auto-completion for "stdio" which is a special class in Kermeta (as System for Java). The typed point makes the system think that you want to call a method on "stdio". Then all the callable methods are proposed and you can choose one of them.

	Note
	The usual <ctrl>+<space> keyboard shortcut is used to access the code completion

Figure 2.2. Auto-Completion in the Kermeta Textual Editor

The outline is a strucutral view of your program. Code is not visible in this view, but the structure that is to say packages, classes, attributes and methods are visible in a tree hierarchy. Usually the outline position is on the top right side of the Eclipse's window. You can get advantages of the outline, when your program reaches a big size and when it is difficult to get a good visibility on the program's strucutre. Browsing the outline is much more faster than browsing the file. Moreover, clicking on an item (packages, classes, attributes or methods) brings you to that item in the file.

	Note
	The Flatten inheritance also display the features of the Object class as all the Kermeta classes inherit from it.

	Warning
	The "Show imported types" feature works on a per file basis and then it only shows the features declared using the require statement in this file and NOT all the files in your project.

Figure 2.3. The outline in Kermeta Text Editor

The textual editor is used to display extra pieces of information than simple text. In the figure below, a parsing error is reporting because of the semicolon which is not allowed in the language. The nice is thing is that in the Eclipse's problems view, just by double clicking on an error opens the errored file and make the cursor focusing on the correct line.

Figure 2.4. Error reporting

Kermeta is meant an executable language. So, we may want to debug programs because of their complexity. It is possible because Kermeta platform includes a debugger. Like in a Java style, some breakpoints can be added to the program by right clicking on the grey line at the left of the editor (as in the figure below). The breakpoint will be added in front of the selected line. Afterwards, when running the debugger, the program will halt at every breakpoint it goes through. At this moment, you will be able to have a look at the variables' value and run step by step or step into some methods.

Figure 2.5. Debugging Information in the Kermeta Text Editor

You can customize your text editor by selecting Window from the Eclipse main menu and then Preferences. The image below shows the page configurator.

Figure 2.6. TextEditor preferences