What are the properties of a "non-participating editor" in eclipse?

Question

The eclipse documentation says that the method

IWorkbenchPage.hideEditor(IEditorReference ref)

will "remove an open editor, turn it into a non-participating editor". But what does non-participating mean? Is the plugin still running in the background? Is it still possible to programmatically access the EditorPart of the hidden editor in another plugin?

If I had a GEF editor and would hide it using hideEditor(), would it still be possible to render an overview of the diagram?

Answer 1

Looking at the Eclipse Kepler implementation of IWorkbenchPage the hideEditor method does nothing except logging an unsupported message if debugging is enabled.