File:Eclipse-select-workspace.png

Modern Integrated Development Environments like Eclipse or Idea make it much easier to edit Groovy scripts for Freeplane as in a normal text editor. Syntax highlighting, code completion, error detection, debugging and source navigation are extremely useful especially if you are not that experienced.

But it's more or less difficult for beginners to setup an IDE properly for Groovy scripting, so here's a step-by-step guide:

1. Download and install a "Eclipse IDE for Java Developers" or "Eclipse for RCP and RAP Developers" (the latter is more useful for regular Freeplane developers) from Eclipse download page.
2. Launch Eclipse for the first time and select some directory as your workspace root Eclipse-select-workspace.png
3. Install the Groovy-Eclipse plugin.
4. Close Eclipse
5. Copy existing Freeplane scripts to workspace (if you have some):

   cp -R ~/.freeplane/1.2.x/scripts/ ~/workspace

1. Download current Freeplane binary distribution and unpack it into the workspace, and rename directory:

   cd ~/workspace
   unzip freeplane_bin-1.2.13.zip
   mv freeplane-1.2.13 freeplane_bin

1. Download matching Freeplane source distribution and unpack it into the workspace and rename directory:

   cd ~/workspace
   tar -xzvf freeplane_src-1.2.13.tar.gz
   mv freeplane-1.2.13 freeplane_src

1. Create a Java Project for the Freeplane binaries:

Eclipse-create-project-freeplane_bin-0.png Eclipse-create-project-freeplane_bin-1.png Eclipse-create-project-freeplane_bin-2.png

1. Create a Groovy Project for the scripts (even if you have none):

eclipse-create-project-scripts-0.png eclipse-create-project-scripts-1.png eclipse-create-project-scripts-2.png eclipse-create-project-scripts-3.png

1. Edit scripts

eclipse-edit-script.png

FIXME: tutorials for using Eclipse?