Why Does Plugin Installation in Eclipse Take so Long?

How often have you tried installing a new simple plugin in your Eclipse and the installation process gets stuck on "Calculating requirements and dependencies" for ages?

Why does this happen?

Eclipse is an extensible software platform comprised of plugins and each plugin depends on other plugins. The successful installation of a new plugin requires its dependencies to be successfully resolved. The ideal situation is when all required plugins are already installed in your Eclipse, but this is often not the case. Therefore, the dependencies must be fetched from an update site and installed together with the plugin you actually want to install.

In order to resolve the above complex task, the Eclipse install manager (the one you invoke using the Install New Software wizard from the Help main menu) scans all update sites registered in the Eclipse workspace. The scanning process involves reading the update site's metadata and then trying to calculate the best match for the required dependencies.

The problem with getting stuck may happen for a number of reasons: the number of update sites registered in the workspace has grown significantly or there is a networking problem with the user connection, one of the update site's server, a proxy or a VPN connection.

What is the relief?

Scanning all update sites is the default behavior of the Eclipse install manager. Fortunately, it can be changed.

First, if you are still waiting on "Calculating requirements and dependencies" then hit the Stop button on the right side of the progress bar. This will immediately stop the installation process (yes - this is one of the rare cases where this button is implemented properly in Eclipse) and it will make the wizard's user interface responsive again.

Now, simply deselect the "Contact all update sites during install to find required software" checkbox. This way the install manager will look for dependencies only on the update site providing the plugin being installed. None of the other update sites, registered in the workspace, will be contacted. This will significantly improve the time spent on the "Calculating requirements and dependencies" phase and it will reduce the size of the metadata that needs to be downloaded.

There is one drawback of deselecting the checkbox. If the update site providing the plugin being installed is not self-contained, i.e. does not provide all the required dependencies, then the installation will fail with an error message for unresolved dependencies. However, this will be a fast failure and you can go back and select the "Contact all update sites..." checkbox again. In such case, I also recommend to go and review all registered updates sites in the Install/Update > Available Software Sites preference page and disable those that do not seem to be related to the plugin being installed.

My personal experience is that the majority of Eclipse plugins install without any need for scanning additional update sites for the required dependencies. My recommendation is to deselect the "Contact all update sites..." checkbox and select it only if the installation process fails without it.

Is there such an option in the Eclipse Marketplace Client?

It's nice that the Install New Software wizard provides a checkbox that can be deselected, but why can't you find a similar checkbox in the Eclipse Marketplace Client?

Well... because you don't need one. The Eclipse Marketplace Client is a smarter and user-friendlier version of the Install New Software wizard. It implements a fallback strategy - first, it tries to resolve the dependencies by only looking at the update site providing the plugin, and only if that fails it will automatically try contacting all update sites.

Effectively, this is an automated implementation of the recommended manual workflow given above for the Install New Software wizard. In case you are curious about the details regarding the implementation of the fallback strategy, you may have a look at the discussion in bug 316362.

Enable the CSS3 Profile in Eclipse

Eclipse has a rich and powerful CSS editor. It provides the expected features like syntax highlighting, content assist and outline. If you have already tried it and you are already on CSS3, you may have noticed that the content assist misses the new CSS3 properties. It looks like the Eclipse CSS editor has somehow stuck on CSS2. But it is not really. The support for CSS3 is there, but ... guess what ... not enabled by default.

Here is how you can enabled the CSS3 features:

1. Right-click on a CSS file and call the Properties dialog.
2. Open the Web Content Settings page.
3. There you will find a field CSS Profile set to "none".
4. Change the CSS Profile value to "CSS3: Cascading Style Sheets, level 3".
5. Click the OK button.

Now, try again the content assist in the CSS editor. It will suggest also the CSS3 properties like "border-radius".

This is how to change the CSS profile per file. It is also possible to change it per project using the same steps on the project's Properties page. But it only works if the project is a Dynamic Web Project or a Static Web Project one. The Web Content Settings page is not available for other project types like PHP projects. It is also not available as a workspace-wide preference. So, for the majority of project types it is only possible to change the CSS profile per file.

The good news is that with Neon M6 the default CSS profile becomes CSS3. See bug 438283. So, the above steps won't be necessary in the near future and users will see the CSS3 features off the shelf.

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.

Highlighting Breakpoints Like in Zend Studio 5.5

Looking at the feedback we receive, it seems that lots of our long-time users feel nostalgic to the pre-Eclipse era of Zend Studio. Here is one hint how you can bring the look and feel of the latest Zend Studio a little bit closer to the one experienced with the legendary Zend Studio 5.5.

In Zend Studio 5.5 when adding a breakpoint the complete line was highlighted in pink color. In later releases of Zend Studio this was replaced by the usual way of the Eclipse Platform - a blue bullet appears in the marker area on the left side of the editor's line.

Luckily, this can be configured in the same way it was in Zend Studio 5.5, following these steps:

1. Call Window > Preferences from the main menu.
2. Navigate to the General > Editors > Text Editors > Annotations preference page.
3. Select "Breakpoints" in the list of annotation types.
4. Select the "Text as" checkbox.
5. Select "Highlighted" from the drop-down list.
6. Change the color to #FFC0CB.
7. (Optional) If you want to remove the blue bullet then deselect the "Vertical ruler" checkbox.
8. Click the OK button.

Note. You need to upgrade to the latest Zend Studio 11.0.1 Early Access build or wait for the official 11.0.1 release (due in a week) to take advantage of this hint. There was a bug in the PHP editor that prevented breakpoint highlighting in previous releases.

Coding Like a Pro

When switching to an Eclipse-based IDE like Zend Studio, some developers become annoyed by the help they are provided in the code editors. Auto closing of braces, parentheses, tags and the like is helpful for beginners and advanced developers who got used to this feature. But for those migrating from tools where they used to have the full control in the editor, this is nothing but a hurdle.

Fortunately, you can switch this off. As you may guess it is hidden in the ocean of preferences. The easiest way to find it is to enter "typing" in the filter field of the Preferences dialog.

As you can see on the above image this filtering gives you the necessary pages where you need to go and deselect the desired checkboxes for the PHP editor, the JavaScript editor and so on in order to customize your typing experience in the IDE.

Eclipse for PHP Developers is Back

After a few years pause the Eclipse for PHP Developers package is back with the Luna M4 milestone of the Eclipse Simultaneous Release.

The package assembles the PHP Development Tools (PDT), the JavaScript Development Tools (JSDT), HTML, CSS and XML editors, and productivity tools like EGit and Mylyn. It is one of the easiest way to start using PDT for developing PHP applications.

The package can be downloaded from the Developer Builds section on the Eclipse Downloads page: http://eclipse.org/downloads/index-developer.php