Can the Eclipse plugin use completions better in the context of Gradle and Groovy?

When I’m editing Java code in Eclipse, the completion facility is extremely critical. It generally does a very good job of making good guesses of what I might need to reference.

This is important not just for writing new code, but for exploring apis.

Perhaps I’m missing something, but I feel like the completion facility within a Gradle script doesn’t usually match the kinds of things I’m looking for. Most of the symbols that we enter in Gradle scripts are property references, as compared to Java code, where you might be referencing more type symbols (class names). When I attempt to do completions while in a Gradle script, it never offers to complete property names, it only ever offers class names.

I did a brief search through issues to see if anyone’s ever mentioned this, but I didn’t see it. Is this a known problem?

I suppose you have STS plugin installed and this is what gives you this basic completion. You can get better support in IntelliJ. Some of the reasons are more dynamic nature of Gradle build language where plugins can contribute through their extensions and decorations applied by Gradle that are not easy to be editor supports in IDEs.

Of course we would like to see better support in this area. Just keep in mind that this is non-trivial task and it will take some time.

Yes, I know it’s very non-trivial. I just wanted to be certain we were on the same page here.