Eclipse/OS X Rant II
Steve and co have done a great job of addressing some of the issues (the ones that were actually relevent to Eclipse) in my previous entry on Eclipse and OS X. One EclipseCON and three weeks later have produced some more information that’s probably better as a new post rather than continuing the comment thread.
Issues #1 and #9 has been fixed! I verified in the latest (I2007030313-1051) integration build. The menu fix in particular helps a great deal.
Comments on previous issues:
Item #3. This is an OS X issue. The dialogs don’t have hot keys. I envy GTK users, as it looks like all the eclipse dialogs have hotkey mappings. The closest thing on OS X is to Tab to the appropriate button and press space.
Item #4. https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=177405
Item #5. I agree that with the amount of information surrounding this there is no approach at a solution. And it’s highly likely this has nothing to do with SWT. A friend suggested that Apple’s JVM could be doing garbage collection differently, and that could be the cause. It does seem to happen more often when there is some sort of File I/O. And it can be pretty bad; locking up for minutes at a time.
Item #7. https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=177407
Item #8. This is not a browser problem. It’s always there, in both the latest integration build and in 3.2.1. But after some comparing with other peoples machines, it looks isolated to me.
Further Issues:
| Toolbar Button Disable Image: On the mac the toolbar buttons that are disabled don’t change color. At least toolbar bottons that act as combo boxes. In the following image some actions are disabled. I find it difficult to tell. |  |
| Combo/Text Boxes: This is a little hard to explain. Text focus is always right justified. Edit a field that has text that is greater than the size of the Combo Box. You cannot see any text to the right without using the mouse to reposition the cursor. This is one that you have to try rather than just see, but here is a control that exhibits the behavior, in the JAR export wizard: |  |
| Property Pages: Read-only text fields to not have proper spacing or borders, and sometimes render extra lines that are not the background color. This screenshot is from a property page for a Java project: |
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| Property Pages #2: There is no context menu in read-only controls. You can copy with [Apple] C, but you cannot perform these types of operations via the context menu. |
| Inconsistencies with layout and widget borders. I think this screenshot speaks for itself. Some things have borders, others do not. Some have scroll bars, others do not. Layout and sizing are inconsistent. Group controls title text is too close to the checkbox above and not close enough to it’s client composite (IMHO). |
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| Buttons: Click at the bottom of a button. Nothing happens until about 5 – 10 pixels up. |
| General Notes: Regarding the overall asthetic value of Eclipse on OS X, some work could be done on how controls and layouts work. Text boxes seem to be the worst offenders. A stroll through the property pages in the Preferences dialog is a good way of seeing this. Overall I’m quite impressed with the response from Eclipse. Open Source is about the community, not the software. |
March 14th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
I agree about the general feeling that there are a few issues with Eclipse on the Mac. However, I feel the ones that are still unresolved in the latest integration builds are minor problems, things that don’t feel optimal, but at least not broken. Except for Bug 129271 (Pasting multiple external resources on Mac OS X pastes only one resource), which makes Eclipse feel sort of buggy when it occurs. This is really a pity in my opinion, given how great and mature Eclipse is overall. On the other hand, I’m starting to think I’m the only one who copies files that way…
March 15th, 2007 at 1:15 am
Re: Toolbar Button Disable Image, I thought you might be interested that it was reported (https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=177065) and resolved/fixed.
March 15th, 2007 at 5:24 am
Good lord, you again!
Please download and try the latest and check the bug system before posting. Some of these issues are bugs that we introduced in 3.3.
The button problem is something we can’t fix (See https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=95892)
Keep this great feedback coming!
Steve
March 15th, 2007 at 6:20 am
Fabian, no, I’ve seen that same problem. I was under the impression (I can’t remember why) that it was an OS X/Java integration issue, rather than an Eclipse one.
Steve,
These screenshots are a mix of 3.2.1 and 3.3 (I2007030313-1051). Next time I will denote versions to make it more straightforward.
March 15th, 2007 at 2:53 pm
Don’t care about the screen shots. Please concentrate on 3.3. We generally only fix critical issues in 3.2.x.
Can you get the latest and update this blog rant?
Steve
March 22nd, 2007 at 3:11 pm
Ken
Are you going to update this blog to match Eclipse 3.3 M6? I didn’t look into them this time because I didn’t have much time and saw some that I thought were already fixed. Don’t bother reporting anything against 3.2.1 right now. We are concentrating on 3.3.
Steve
March 23rd, 2007 at 6:29 am
Steve, yes, I’m going to wait for M6 and update accordingly. I had too may issues w/ M5 for general use.
March 26th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
I tried M6 today. The look is different, I think the blue view/editor border may be too heavy. I had problems with setting breakpoints, intermittent problems with the Package Explorer getting updates when I created files, and the SVN create project wizard is broken. I had to go back to 3.2.2, and was not able to get that far into M6 regarding UI on OS X. Hopefully M7 will be better.
March 27th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
I can’t help you directly with these Eclipse issues. Please make sure there are bug reports for them.
I think I’m done here (for now). Make sure there are SWT bug reports for the “Further Issues” that still exist in M6 and we can communicate through the bug system.
Until your next rant!
Steve