My Eclipse Wantlist

by Billy Biggs <vektor@dumbterm.net>

I was inspired by Tom Tromey's wishlist for Eclipse, so I decided to do one myself. Here is my list of things I would really like to see solved in Eclipse, mostly directed towards better Linux integration.

  1. Ship with a standard .desktop file (how does Firefox install theirs?).
  2. Even though each group builds their own .so files, there should be a standard build mechanism that does build everyone's native code, at least for the SDK if possible (bug 57897, bug 71637).
  3. Have a document for how to do shared-user installs of Eclipse. Have this setup be tested more formally.
  4. Publish recommendations for packagers.
  5. Ship with man pages (bug 30107).
  6. Add --help support for the eclipse launcher (bug 25334).
  7. Fix our detached views to be of _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_UTILITY (bug 52669, bug 79462).
  8. Use GNOME button ordering (what about KDE? only do this if we're running under GNOME?).
  9. Use GNOME button images for standard dialog buttons).
  10. Fix the welcome screen image to not look like ass (or at least use the browser widget if available on Linux!) (bug 61175).
  11. Dialog box to find an installed JVM if one not found.
  12. Add a terminal plugin.
  13. Website download page should detect OS based on browser info (like Firefox's download page).
  14. Download page should advertise stable version more prominantly, have a separate link for developer builds.
  15. Fix the launcher so that it does not have to live where the rest of the install is (bug 79592).
  16. Handle ~ expansion in certain dialogs that take file names (bug 5717, bug 72607).
  17. Read-only text entries are often used as selectable labels. We should instead use the native GTK+ selectable label widget where appropriate (bug 71765).
  18. Ship icons in more standard sizes and formats than just the .xpm file (png? 48x48? 64x64?) - this would help the .desktop file.
  19. Fix the startup splash image to be _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_SPLASH (bug 79944).

Here are items from my wishlist that are now done (yay!).

  1. Support import and export to .tar.gz files (bug 33897).
  2. UNIX builds should be as .tar.gz files and not .zip files (bug 79711).
  3. Change the default workspace directory to be in the users's home directory (bug 73810).
  4. Use gdk-pixbuf for all label icons (bug 63266).

Copyright © 2004 Billy Biggs <vektor@dumbterm.net>