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This bug captures a high-level potential Mylyn capability that may or may not make any sense. When working on a task, I end up with a lot of extraneous stuff that isn't related to the task per se. Looking at the garbage, I realized that almost all of the noise has to do with explorations I've done into related code. For example, I might want to look at how something is implemented deep within a plugin somewhere. I don't intend to actually edit it and I often (but not always) won't have any interest in it again. More generally, even within the same task I often end up having some sort of cross-cutting concern. For example, I might need to maintain plugins or manifests to support builds. Now arguably I could create an entirely different context for that but what I'd really like is some kind of cross product of my active context and my present concern. The concern is orthogonal in content, it represents Type of Concern as opposed to Degree of Concern, but the UI filtering tools and other features of the context mechanism would be perfect to support this kind of thing, and IMO it is one of the real productivity killers in the Eclipse environment. Perhaps allowing more granular content types or a content type namespace (e.g. java.code, java.doc, pde.dependencies, pde.manifest) would work, but rather than have this be context tooling supplied I think it would be much more powerful to have it user-definable. Put another way, what I think I'm proposing is a kind of super filter. It's always bugged me that you have to maintain this is multiple places and Mylyn doesn't (can't?) support project explorer filters anyway, but has a large part of the necessary infrastructure to really make this work. I don't know if there is something like this contemplated or even partially supported now.
Looking above, I realized that I didn't explain that the "modes" don't need to be type related. They might simply be advice that would allow contexts to treat different usage modes in different ways. So for example the user would be able to select his or her mode which might be "Java Coding", "Plugin Maintenance" or "Java Exploration". I'm realizing now that this gets into an area that has already been tackled in many different ways in the past, including capabilities and perhaps is arguably actually the functionality that perspectives provide. But perspectives are too course grained. Here I would like the user to be able to stay within the same basic workbench setup, but filtered in different ways.
I think this needs to be a more concrete feature request before it can be considered.
Mylyn has been restructured, and our issue tracking has moved to GitHub [1]. We are closing ~14K Bugzilla issues to give the new team a fresh start. If you feel that this issue is still relevant, please create a new one on GitHub. [1] https://github.com/orgs/eclipse-mylyn
