Built-in Activities

Extensions run at the application level rather than within an Activity. This allows them to continue operating independently of the current UI. Since this is not the standard approach for Android application development, Android does not provide a dedicated API for dynamically accessing activities at runtime.

To address this, Xed-Editor internally provides several helper classes and static properties that let you safely access the current Activity or a specific one.

This is often needed to display a dialog, launch another activity, request permissions, or interact with other Android APIs that require an activity context.

Current Activity

ActivityProvider always exposes the activity that is currently in the foreground.

val activity = ActivityProvider.currentActivity

currentActivity may be null if no activity is currently available, so always handle this case before using it:

ActivityProvider.currentActivity?.let { activity ->
    // ...
}

Specific Activity

Sometimes an extension needs access to a specific Xed-Editor activity rather than just the currently visible one. For these cases, Xed-Editor exposes static activity instances that can be accessed directly.

You can access the MainActivity, SettingsActivity and Terminal activity like this:

val mainActivity = MainActivity.instance
val settingsActivity = SettingsActivity.instance
val terminal = Terminal.instance

These instances may be null if the activity has not been created yet or has already been destroyed.

However, keep in mind that an activity not being visible does not necessarily mean it is unavailable. Android often keeps activities alive in the back stack, allowing them to be reused when the user returns to them.

ViewModels

Accessing the MainActivity instance is particularly useful when you need to interact with the main app state. For example, you can get the MainViewModel to manage tabs or the editor:

val viewModel = MainActivity.instance?.viewModel
val tabManager = viewModel?.tabManager