Need to create a dialog for displaying and selecting from a list of items with filtering support, similar to Open Type/Resource?

Subclass FilteredItemsSelectionDialog (since Eclipse 3.3). Override methods to define your providers and filtering policy.

Similar implementations are Open Task dialog from Mylyn (Ctrl+F12) and Open Plug-in Artifact from PDE 3.4 (Ctrl+Shift+A). You can take a look at their source code to see how they were implemented. If using Eclipse 3.4, use the cool Plugin Spy (Alt+Shift+F1) while dialog is open to discover and get linked to the class source code.

How to make an ToolItem produced by an IAction show both text and image when working with IToolBarManager?

When working with raw SWT ToolBar/ToolItem this is easily accomplished. But when you are working with JFace IToolbarManager/IAction, you will see that even if you define both text and image for an IAction using #setText(String) and #setImage(ImageDescriptor), the resulting control will show only the image. No need to curse JFace developers!

The ToolItem creation itself is delegated to an IContributionItem. When you invoke IToolBarManager#add(IAction), the action is encapsulated inside an IContributionItem implementation instance, ActionContributionItem, whose policy is: if the IAction defines only text, the ToolItem has only text; if the IAction defines an image, use only the image, regardless of text presence.

If you want to display text and image, you need to manually create an ActionContributionItem and override the default policy calling ActionContributionItem.setMode(ActionContributionItem.MODE_FORCE_TEXT).

IAction action = new MyAction();
ActionContributionItem ci = new ActionContributionItem(action);
ci.setMode(ActionContributionItem.MODE_FORCE_TEXT);
IToolBarManager tbm = new ToolBarManager();
tbm.add(ci);

This way, the ToolItem will display text and image, positioned according to the ToolBar style: text under image by default; text after image, if using SWT.RIGHT style.

java -jar startup.jar -application org.eclipse.update.core.standaloneUpdate -command mirror -from http://download.eclipse.org/callisto/releases -to c:\eclipse-mirror -mirrorURL http://your.local.domain

Run this command from Eclipse install directory (i.e. where startup.jar is). 

Replace "c:\eclipse-mirror" with the local directory where the update site contents will be copied to, and "http://your.local.domain" with a URL which will point to the directory you informed.

Of course you will need to install a local web server, like Apache HTTPD and configure it according the directory/URL you specified before.

This is useful for making available a full Callisto release to internal corporate users, for example, reducing the bandwidth normally used with dozens of users downloading the same bits from external Callisto sites.

This feature also can be used to mirror any Eclipse update site and it is documented in more details here. 

I just found a page that explains this funny authentication protocol: on success, the server responds “I LOVE YOU“; on failure, “I HATE YOU”.

Now, let‘s talk serious: it seems that Eclipse mixed some CVS dump with ANT output in the console, but… I LOVE YOU? WTF!!!

I made some minor improvements over the original VS Presentation, and there is now a new “VS Improved Presentation” : (screenshot)

It has the minimize and maximize buttons. The editor tab now show the corresponding icon.

Install instructions:

• Just download the jar file and put it into plugins directory of Eclipse 3.1 (still using 3.0? sorry… it is time to upgrade
• In Window > Preferences > General > Appearance > Current Presentation, you will see two options: “VS Presentation“ (the original) and “VS Improved Presentation”. Select one and restart Eclipse.

He posted interesting information on making a custom presentation as default in RCP applications.

Some time ago, I started investigating the presentations API.

It is available since Eclipse 3.0, but it is not a very “popular” API. There is no documentation, no tutorials, no articles, and the only thing I found was some examples lost in Eclipse CVS.

The presentations API enable us to customize the look and feel of views and editors in Eclipse.

I started a project in SourceForge. The first release from this project was inspired by the idea in the start of this post. It is a presentation that mimics the look and feel from Visual Studio.NET.

Personnaly, I think VS.NET workbench looks better than Eclipse in some aspects, but it has a lot of usability problems, like:

• Editor bar: it is very hard to see where is some file.
• Navigation through editors and views: the scroll buttons are very confusing.

The intend of this plugin was to emulate VS.NET workbench, so these annoyances were replicated as much as possible

It is not fully functional nor fully VS.NET compliant yet:

• Ctrl+E does not work because apparently it is handled by presentation; it is not a “global“ action like Ctrl+F6.
• There is no “pin button“ on view‘s title bar, because I found no way to turn a IPresentablePart into a fast view. I think this functionality was not exposed in the public API.
• In VS.NET, the view tabs are “stretched” when you resize them horizontally. I think this is one of the dumbest usability bugs in VS.NET, and it is somewhat difficult to implement, so I decided to create scroll buttons like in the editor bar.

Download page.

To install, just drop the jar in the plugins directory of a Eclipse 3.1 installation (yes, it uses the new 3.1‘s feature: deploy plugins as jars), and select “VS Presentation” in Window > Preferences > General > Appearance > Current Presentation. Restart Eclipse.

Screenshots:

Visual Studio.NET:

Eclipse with VS Presentation plugin: