Eclipse Usage

This articles focuses on Eclipse usage and configuration.

Line Wrapping

Line wrapping (soft-wrap as well as hard-wrap) seems to be one of Eclipse's current weakness. I hope the situation improves soon, because it is a pity that such a simple (but essential) feature is absent. In the meantime I have found the following solutions:

• Line wrapping by Eclipse works for certain types of files. For Java code, for example, you can go to Preferences->Java->Code Style->Formatter. Then click "Show..." and you will have access to line wrapping. But this is not present for C++ code via the CDT tools... It also does not work for PHP and plain text files.

• In Preferences->Java->Code Style->Formatter you may define a certain number of profiles. To make sure these profiles are actually used within your project, you should *disable* project specific settings on your project (via Properties->Code Style->Formatter). That feature can be useful, but then in order to apply changes you have to edit directly your project properties, not the global profiles.

• Soft wrapping can be done via a very useful plugin. See this page for details.

Installation Features

• Under Gentoo and Eclipse 3.2.1, the mirrors for the Update/Install of plugins are apparently not saved. A workaround is to select the "Automatic Mirror Selection" feature in the Preferences.

• To install PHP Development Tools (PDT), add the http://download.eclipse.org/tools/php/updates/ download site to the list of Eclipse sites.

• To install LaTeX support via the Texlipse plugin, add the http://texlipse.sourceforge.net/ download site to the list of Eclipse sites.

• To install Python support via the PyDev plugin, add the http://pydev.sourceforge.net/updates/ and http://www.fabioz.com/pydev/updates (for the PyDev extensions) download sites to the list of Eclipse sites.

Controlling manually the download sites and mirrors

To change the download/update URL of a feature, go to features/my_feature/feature.xml. For example with PDT:

nano features/org.eclipse.php_feature_0.7.0.v20070221------9FhPQOPhhd/feature.xml

Then look for the correct XML node (<url></url>).

Appearance customization

Eclipse uses views and perspectives. Perspectives are in fact a set of views; many plugins come with their own views and perspectives. You can define your own perspective; however developing views is harder (you probably need to code).

Font customization is available in Preferences->General->Appearance. However some text seems to be set on a system-level, for example the font on the navigator view.

Viewing Help

Online help is better viewed with an external browser (Firefox) than with Eclipse slow and buggy integrated browser. You can select in Preferences->Help the browser you want to use.

PHP Development Tools (PDT)

This plugin, as of March 2007, is still in active development. One of the thing that seems to NOT work correctly is the auto-completion unfortunately.

Eclipse and Gentoo amd64

• Eclipse currently seems unfortunately very unstable on Gentoo AMD64. Many bugs, some plugins don't work correctly, etc...

• As of March 2007 it seems better to download the binary version from the Eclipse web site rather than build Eclipse through Portage. In my case Eclipse seems stabler with the binary version.

• Eclipse currently can not seem to handle large files (1 MB or more). This is a real problem and even seems to happen on other platforms than Linux x86_64.

• It seems imperative to add the following arguments when launching Eclipse:

-vmargs -Xms256m -Xmx512m -XX:PermSize=64M -XX:MaxPermSize=128M

Else Eclipse will be very slow and will keep crashing. Just configuring these settings seemed to make Eclipse run MUCH faster.

Eclipse Preferences

• They seem to be stored in the workspace/.metadata folder. For example, key shortcuts are stored there - do not delete this folder or you will lose all your custom keys!