Eclipse Juno Patch for XML Editor Performance

Eclipse Juno has a number of performance regressions compared to Indigo. Switching back and forth between XML and Java editors can be tediously slow even in Juno SR1.

The patch provided for bug 394588 solves the issue or at least significantly improves the response time of the IDE.

In my team, we have tested the patch successfully on Windows 32 bit and Ubuntu Linux 64 bit with Oracle Java 6 and 7.

The patch can be installed from a special update site via Help | Install New Software.

Fixing Editor Tab Fonts in Eclipse Juno

Eclipse Juno is out! It starts a good deal faster than Indigo, shows a more colourful (but ill-proportioned) splash screen, and then opens a workbench window with oversized and truncated labels in all editor tabs.

This applies to Ubuntu 12.04 with KDE and the QtCurve GTK+ theme.

This issue is not due to QtCurve or SWT, as I had first suspected, but to the new CSS-based widget styling of the e4 platform. There is an E4 CSS Editor which is not included in Juno by default, but can be installed via the Update Manager.

With this editor, you can change the font-size and font-family properties of the MPartStack style used by the editor tabs.

Much better!

Update 14 Aug 2012: If you develop web applications and edit CSS files in Eclipse, you'd better deinstall the E4 CSS editor after customizing the workbench layout to fall back to the standard WTP CSS editor. The XText-based E4 editor does not recognize some legal syntax like unquoted URLs.

Actually, you don't need any Eclipse plugin to change the CSS, you can directly edit the CSS file in your Eclipse installation at plugins/org.eclipse.platform_4.2.0.v20120608140/css/e4_default_gtk.css.