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Eclipse 4diac Weekly #70

Update on what development happened across the Eclipse 4diac project in the week from January 16, 2026 to January 23, 2026.

This week’s updates bring improvements to 4diac IDE, including refactoring of library element handling, better editor interaction, and improved visuals in light and dark themes. 4diac FORTE receives improvements related to documentation generation and composite FB connection support.

Enhancements and Fixes in 4diac IDE

  • Type System & Library Infrastructure

    • Removed obsolete editable type entries and adapter-related functionality.
    • Introduced a unified library element provider and integrated it across:
      • Decorators and content providers
      • Refactorings and quick fixes
      • Bulk editor
      • Type and system editors
      • ST editor
      • Debug UI
    • Added supporting infrastructure for library elements:
      • Dependency tracker and updater
      • Activation listener
      • State listener
      • Undo manager
      • Sub-editor input

  • Editor & Viewer Behavior

    • Fixed editor and viewer background handling to consistently use theme colors, ensuring correct appearance in dark mode and clear differentiation between editor and viewer.
    • Fixed moving blocks between editors.
    • Enabled seamless connections between graphical editors.
    • Improved connection feedback when crossing viewer borders.
    • Re-enabled canvas panning via middle mouse button and space + left mouse button.
    • Removed now unnecessary drag-and-drop handling due to improved direct editor interaction.

  • Interaction & Usability Improvements

    • Restricted predecessor functionality to the same subapplication.
    • Improved connection handling:
      • Fixed FB type change with differing connection types.
      • Invoked connection source marker handler only on left click.
      • Tuned connection colors and added dedicated dark mode variants.
    • Fixed mouse cursor handling outside the source editor (currently Windows-only).
    • Improved auto-expose and scrolling behavior:
      • Moved view search logic to the edit domain.
      • Added a custom auto-expose helper with improved thresholds and acceleration.
      • Used the FordiacViewportAutoexposeHelper in the ECC editor.
    • Fixed marquee selection issues when crossing editor borders.

  • Modeling & Semantics

    • Deployed initial values of member input variables.
    • Promoted invalid assignment of inputs to an error.
    • Fixed missing package name in internal FB configuration strings.
    • Reset variables without explicit defaults in the evaluator.
    • Fixed recursive insert checks for FBs.
    • Fixed attribute search to correctly consider fully qualified type names.
    • Fixed setting of VarConfig in FB types.

  • Navigation & Views

    • Updated the Type Navigator to show only type libraries.

  • Robustness

    • Improved handling of circular dependencies when loading types by logging warnings and creating error types during import.

Enhancements and Fixes in 4diac FORTE

  • API Documentation

    • Cleaned up Doxygen configuration by removing obsolete STRIP_FROM_PATH entries.
    • Added stdfblib to the Doxygen input directories.
    • Fixed Doxyfile paths to ensure correct documentation generation.

  • Composite FBs & IO Layer

    • Fixed fully qualified names of FBs in the IO layer.
    • Added support for delegating connections in composite FBs.
    • Added tests covering delegating connections in composite FBs.

Many thanks to all contributors for their work and their feedback!

Cheers,
The Eclipse 4diac Team

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