Making the Text Editor to be the Default One for All Unknown Files in Eclipse

NOTE. The functionality of the Default Text Editor plugin has been implemented in the Eclipse Platform with the Neon release. Check the release notes for details.

Eclipse users usually work with many different file types. Some of the file types may be opened by default in an external editor instead of in the Eclipse workbench. This happens if Eclipse has no editor available to handle that particular file type, but there is one installed in the operating system. In such case Eclipse assumes that it is better for the user to have the file opened in the external system editor.

Lots of users are quite annoyed by this behavior, especially when it comes to text-based files. They would prefer to have the file opened in the plain text editor of Eclipse instead of switching the context to the external program. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to change this in the preference settings. It's possible to associate a specific file extension with the plain text editor, but this must be done separately for every file extensions. There is no way to say "all text files of unknown type should open in the text editor".

Here comes the Default Text Editor plugin. It takes advantage of the Editor Association Override extension point introduced in Eclipse 3.8. When the plugin is installed it will change the default behavior of Eclipse and will opened all text files of unknown type in the plain text editor. Binary files like images may still be opened in an external system editor. As simple as that.

The plugin is available on the Eclipse Marketplace. It can also be installed through an update site. More info is available on the GitHub project.

$150 Bug Bounty for Fixing a Dark Theme Issue

Zend Studio is an IDE based on the Eclipse Platform. The dark theme is an important feature and is very popular among PHP developers. The most annoying issue with the dark theme, we have at the moment, is that the expand/collapse toggle in trees is almost invisible on Windows, because it seems to be unaffected by the dark theme coloring. See Eclipse bug 434201 for details.

We decided to put some money on the table with the hope that someone will step in and fix this bug. This will benefit not only Zend Studio users, but all Windows users in the Eclipse ecosystem who want to use the dark theme.

We created a $150 bug bounty on the FreedomSponsors crowd-funding platform. Follow this link to open the sponsored issue. Since this is a crowd-funding platform, anyone else who is ready to give some money for resolving this issue is welcome to do it, so the offer becomes more attractive.

UPDATE. The bug has been fixed within days and it will be delivered with the Mars M7 milestone. Thanks to Fabio Zadrozny for his great work. Kudos to Lars Vogel for adding $100 more to the bounty.