5 reasons to use EGerrit - #5, Being in Eclipse

To celebrate the release of EGerrit 1.1 and make you try it out, we (the EGerrit team, Jacques Bouthillier, Guy Perron, Marc Khouzam and myself) have decided to gather 5 reasons to use EGerrit and we will be posting one reason per week.

Reason #5 – Being in Eclipse.

“Being in Eclipse”?! Is that really a reason to use EGerrit? Isn’t that obvious?

Every time you bring a tool to Eclipse, there is the obvious gain of saving the user the “context switch”. In EGerrit we are addressing this by providing a view to list reviews,

Gerrit Dashboard

an editor to manage a review (rebase, submit, etc.),

Gerrit Review editor

and simple ways to comment. But beyond this, what really interests us is the integration (like in “I” of IDE) with the rest of the Eclipse ecosystem to simplify and enrich the act of performing a review.
Here is a list of some of the benefits so far:

• By integrating with the compare editor, you can perform reviews with the most relevant editor for the given file. For example with EMF compare installed, you get a nice comparison of the EMF ecore file rather than a textual comparison; for Java files you get a java editor which takes into account your preferences for syntax coloring;

  

  Comparing ecore file from a review

  
  

• By building on top of EGit, users get the UI they are familiar with when checking out code, get full access to previous versions of the code through the integrated Git blame or the History view, and can optionally perform reviews using the quick diff capability;
• The user has access to the complete source code (instead of just the few files that are part of the review), with full navigation and all syntax-aware features, thus being able to really measure the implication of a change.

You can download EGerrit from the Neon release repo or from the Eclipse Marketplace. For questions, you can connect with us on egerrit-dev@eclipse.org; and for bugs or to take a peek at the future you can see our Kanban board.