By default, Eclipse does a pretty good job of syntax highlighting Java files without going overboard. But, if you want a fresh look — maybe you want to try a dark background — the Eclipse Color Theme plugin lets you change whole editor themes with the click of your mouse.

The Eclipse Color Theme plugin is free and so are the themes. So far I’m liking the dark Oblivion theme, shown below.

the problem

The problem was this: plugins did not appear to work. I dutifully installed my standard plugin set using the Update Manager but discovered no evidence of the effort after a restart. Subclipse? Missing. Mousefeed? FindBugs? nWire? Missing!

(Want to skip to the solution without reading more?)

Help > About > Installation Details showed they were installed but none were shown on Features or Plug-ins tabs. Apparently installed doesn’t mean installed in the typical sense of the word.

troubleshooting

• starting eclipse with -clean didn’t seem to help
• starting eclipse with -consoleLog -debug didn’t turn up anything
• starting eclipse with -console and using the ss command on the osgi console did not turn up the wayward plugins

peer support via IRC

Misery loves company, as they say, so I went to #eclipse on IRC. After sharing my troubles and troubleshooting, a person with the nick paulweb515_ began helping me.

At this point, I determined my plugins were being installed in ~/.eclipse/.../features/ and ~/.eclipse/.../plugins/. Huh? What is this? Apparently that’s a feature of Eclipse. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

While in #eclipse I did some more extensive Google searching and turned up a bug report, titled Plugins install, but do not work, which seemed to mirror my problem.

The bug report indicated that Eclipse places plugins and features in ~/.eclipse/ when the user does not have sufficient permission for the eclipse program directory itself. As I wrote before, apparently that’s a feature. But, still, my plugins weren’t working!

the solution

My solution, then, is to install Eclipse in a location where the user has full rights. For Windows 7 users, a good location might be under the user’s home directory (%USERPROFILE%). Alternatively, the user could be granted full control of the Eclipse program directory.

While I’m glad my Eclipse is back to normal, I’m still disappointed in the amount of time wasted on the problem. And, unfortunately, I’ve not been able to determine if this ~/.eclipse/ feature is broken or if something else is going sideways.

Update: Looks like the author of nWire has posted about this issue.

Ubuntu’s Eclipse package also depends on GCJ. If you wish to avoid this dependency, simply download the appropriate binary distribution from the Eclipse download site, extract to the location of your choice, and run Eclipse.

Before using Eclipse, be sure you have Sun’s JRE installed and configured as the default JRE.

Here’s how I installed Ant on Ubuntu without GCJ. Be sure to check out (easier) alternatives suggested in the comments, below.

1. Download the current .tar.bz2 distribution of Ant from http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/mirrors/apache/ant/binaries/.
2. Unpack archive using tar.

tar -xjvf apache-ant-*-bin.tar.bz2

3. Move the unpacked directory to /usr/local/ant.
4. Change that directory’s owner to root.

chown -R root:root /usr/local/ant

5. Add the following lines to /etc/bash.bashrc.

export ANT_HOME=/usr/local/ant
export PATH=${PATH}:${ANT_HOME}/bin

From a new shell, run ant. You should see the following:

Buildfile: build.xml does not exist!
Build failed

Yes, it’s a failure message. But it means Ant is working as expected.