Mirko Stocker

Many good reviews already cover all the nice new features that are in Eclipse Helios, so I’m going to show you a three annoyances that have been bothering me for years and are still not fixed in Helios. And these aren’t things like the high memory consumption or the sluggish interface.

Multiple Desktops

A bug that I observe almost every time I start Eclipse is Bug Nr. 98540, Eclipse shells open on different desktops (created in 2005). The problem is:

I launch the Eclipse process on one desktop, and then switch to another. The splash shell opens on the second desktop, not the one from which it was launched.

If you’re not using multiple desktops, this might not sound like a huge problem, but I can tell you, it’s really annoying if Eclipse just follows you around and doesn’t stay on the desktop it belongs to. This is not restricted to starting the initial Eclipse instance but also happens when you’re developing plugins and launch a new workspace.

Global Preferences

There are certain preferences I want in all my Eclipse instances, for example the “Show Heap Status”, or the Font of the editor. So it would be really nice if there were something like global preferences that can be saved somewhere and are then used by all workspaces. It’s already possible to manually import and export preferences, so you can share preferences, but doing it manually is tedious.

Another interesting project going into a similar direction is Google’s Workspace Mechanic. A bug report also exists since 2005.

Unnecessary Scrollbars Shown

The following screenshot should make the problem obvious:

Why are there scrollbars shown? I don’t use any other GTK programs, so this might be a GTK problem; but it still annoys me from time to time. And there’s a bug report for it since 2002.

Despite all these problems, I’m still a very happy Eclipse user and developer, so congratulations for this otherwise great release!