Instantiating the Core Editor
The Visual Studio core editor is the default editor of Visual Studio. The editor supports text-editing functions such as insert, delete, copy, and paste. Its functionality combines with that provided by the language that it is currently editing, such as text colorization, indentation, and IntelliSense statement completion.
You provide an instance of the core editor to your VSPackage in one of three ways:
Explicitly create an instance of the core editor in a window.
Provide an editor factory which returns an instance of the core editor
Open a file from the project hierarchy using a utility function.
For an example implementation of this, see the EditorFactory class in the EditorFactory.cs file, located in the Visual C# version of the Example.XMLDesigner sample. By default, this sample is located in: C:\Program Files\Visual Studio 2008 SDK\<version number>\VisualStudioIntegration\Samples\ IDE\CSharp\Example.XmlDesigner.
Explicitly Opening a Core Editor Instance
When explicitly obtaining an instance of the core editor:
Obtain a IVsTextBuffer to hold the document data object being edited.
Create a line oriented representation of the document data object by creating an IVsTextLines interface from the IVsTextBuffer interface.
Set IVsTextLines as the document data object for an instance of the default implementation of the IVsCodeWindow interface, using the SetBuffer method.
Host the IVsCodeWindow instance in a IVsWindowFrame interface by using the CreateToolWindow method.
At this point, displaying the IVsWindowFrame interface provides a window that contains an instance of the core editor.
However, this is not a very useful instance, because it does not have shortcut keys, or access to advanced features. To obtain access to shortcut keys and advanced features:
Use the SetLanguageServiceID method to associate a language service and the document data object that the editor uses.
Either create your own shortcut keys, or use the system default by setting the IVsWindowFrame objects display properties. To do this, call the SetGuidProperty method with the VSFPROPID_InheritKeyBindings property.
To obtain and use non-standard shortcut keys, generate them using the .vsct file. For more information, see Visual Studio Command Table (.Vsct) Files.
How to Use an Editor factory to Obtain the Core Editor
When implementing a core editor with an editor factory using the CreateEditorInstance method, follow all the steps outlined in the previous section to explicitly host an IVsCodeWindow using an IVsTextBuffer document data object, in an IVsWindowFrame object.
To display the text, obtain a IVsTextView interface from the IVsCodeWindow object and call the CreateEditorInstance method.
To provide a language service to the editor, call the SetLanguageServiceID method within the CreateEditorInstance method.
To obtain default shortcut keys, unlike the previous section, you use the command context returned by the CreateEditorInstance method when obtaining the core editor from the CreateEditorInstance method.
If the CreateEditorInstance method returns the same command GUID as the text editor, the instance of the core editor automatically obtains the default shortcut keys.
For general information, see How to: Use the Managed Package Framework Classes to Register Editor Factories and Walkthrough: Invoking the Core Editor.
See Also
Tasks
Walkthrough: Invoking the Core Editor