June 24, 2010

Fix for break points, line numbers, and other UI bugs in Eclipse on OS X

There are a number of small bugs with Eclipse on OS X that you may run into from time to time. Some of the biggest ones that I have seen are line numbers not showing up in the code editor, break points not showing, line numbers not scrolling when you scroll the code window, errors not showing in the code editor and a host of other small things like this with the UI.

This mainly takes place when I go from having a duel display environment to unhooking my laptop from the external monitor or vice versa. Use too think the the only fix for this was restarting OS X after I make the switch from one setup to another but passing an argument to eclipse when it startes up seems to do the trick. Restarting Eclipse is way faster than having to restart OS X.

Here is what you do:

  1. close Eclipse if it is open
  2. open up a terminal window … (if you don't know what terminal is then you may not really be a developer)
  3. execute Eclipse from terminal and pass it the "clean" argument like so  
$ /Applications/eclipse/eclipse -clean

If eclipse is installed somewhere else on your system then naturally you will need to use the proper path to get to the eclipse directory.

Posted via email from Matthew Sloan Wallace

February 11, 2009

Remove unwanted buttons form Eclipse / Flex Builder Toolbar

Something that has really been bugging me for a long time about Eclipse IDE / Flex Builder is the fact that I could not figure out how to remove items from the toolbar at the top after I install some needed plugins. Well all the plugins are needed but some of them don’t really get used all that much. A good example for me would be that I have the cfeclipse plugin but I really don’t use CF all that much and the cfeclipse plugin once installed puts a lot of extra stuff at the top in the toolbar.

Here is a screen grab of what kind of mess I was dealing with before I figured this out.

Eclipse Messy ToolBar

Now if you have been looking for this solution it is pretty easy once you know where to look. It is actually easier than changing your code editor font size. If you have ever had to figure that one out you know what I mean. Pretty damn difficult if you don’t know where to look.

Here are the steps

1. After Eclipse / Flex Builder is open you need to go to the Window menu and select Customize Perspective.

Customize Prespective

2. Once the Customize Perspective panel is open you need to select Commands tab.

Customize Preferances Panel

3. In my case I clicked on CFEclipse in the left hand menu and to the right you will see all the buttons and short cuts displayed for that plugin. All I did was uncheck the box next to CFEclipse then then click OK. Now I have a toolbar that is not over loaded with buttons Yeah!

Custome Elipse Toolbar

Let me know if this works for you guys as well cause for me it has been months of wondering how to do this.

December 4, 2008

TextMate may be dead when developing Actionscript

One of my most trafficked section of my blog is on installing the Flex and Actionscript 3 bundles for TextMate. Don’t let the title fool you. I still really really really enjoy TextMate. It has some great features for sure, but I have to say that Adobe has made a great move in using the Eclipse Platform for code editing Flex and Actionscipt 3 projects.

In the past I have done a tutorial on how to using Flex Builder for your Flash projects and it was a bit of a pain in the ass to set this up. Hence the reason I did a tutorial on how to do it. Even Flash Evangelist Lee Brimelow was linking to my post on how to install the Flex and AS3 bundles. Well leave it to Lee to one up me and I am so glad that he did. For the last week or so Lee has been experimenting and creating tools for better setting up Eclipse so that you can do all your Flash “Actionscript 3″ coding in Eclipse. He is utilizing some existing plugins, creating some plugins of his own and has also created an AIR application that does a really good job of creating the project files and directories needed for editing AS3 code that is part of a Flash CS4 project. The last post he talked about moving this AIR app over to be an Eclipse plugin as well. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with.

Do yourself a huge favor and head over to Lee’s site “TheFlashBlog.com” and check out what he has been doing. It will make your Actionscript and Flex development life a lot better and you will feel like you have all the tools that you need. It also sounds like this set up is only going to get better and better.