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For understanding and debugging Xtext it helps tremendously to see an outline of the node model. I wrote a plug-in that provides an ISemanticModelTransformer to see such an outline in Xtext 1.x, see http://www.ralfebert.de/blog/xtext/node_outline/ I'd like to improve this and contribute it to Xtext. Maybe this could be part of an optional "xtext spy" plug-in that allows to see the internals of Xtext. Jan mentioned an outline redesign: For such a plug-in it would be great to have a hook that allows to contribute additional nodes to all Xtext outlines globally.
I think this really is a useful debugging facility for language designers. That's why I don't see such things in the deployed IDE but would like to have this while debugging a file (i.e. a debugging view). We have plans to work on that, but not during this release train. Anyway, for now we maybe could make your contribution a view (similar to some of the PDE views). It should be part of org.eclipse.xtext.xtext.ui, which is the bundle for language design tooling. I also would like to be able to see the values (offset, length. grammar element, etc.) of a selected node in a detail part of the view. Do you want to work on such a view?
A separate view would be fine if the outline facilities can be reused for this; I'll have a look at it.
The Xtext Tools project https://github.com/OLibutzki/xtext.tools provides similar functionalities.
