Setting up .java files to automatically open with Eclipse on Mac OS X

With the 3.6 (aka, Helios) release of Eclipse, there is now support for opening files from the operating system command line or file browser directly into Eclipse. This has been a long-standing feature request (one of the oldest requests to ever have been implemented, in fact) and many people are happy to have it. Here is a quick tutorial on utilizing this feature under Mac OS X to associate .java files so that they open in Eclipse upon double-click from Finder. Although this demonstrates using .java files, you can do the same for any other file type; as long as your installation of Eclipse has an editor to handle that file type, it should work just fine.

1. Just to re-iterate, you have to have Eclipse Helios (version 3.6 of the platform) in order to take advantage of this feature. If you don't already have it, go get it.
2. In Finder, locate a .java file that you'd like to open in Eclipse; right-click (or Control+click if that's the way you roll) and select Get Info
   
   
   
   
3. In the Info dialog, under the "Open with:" section, click the drop-down list and select Other...
   
   
   
   
4. Here comes the only tricky part about this process.
   In the resulting Finder dialog to select an application, navigate to where Eclipse is installed. You'll see Eclipse.app listed but chances are, it's disabled; you can't select it. You just have to enable it using the Enable: drop-down list at the bottom of the window, as shown here:
   
   Once you do that, you'll be able to select Eclipse.app.
   
   
5. Before clicking the Add button, decide if you want to select the "Always Open With" option (checkbox). Then click Add.
6. Back in the "Info" dialog, you can use the Change All... button to associate all .java files with Eclipse. Even if you don't do it now, you an always come back to this dialog and do it later.

That's it. Now when you double-click on .java files they will be opened in the Eclipse installation that you selected. If an instance of Eclipse is already running, that instance will open the file. Otherwise, a new instance will be started.

Launching Multiple Instances of Eclipse on Mac OS X

Doug Schaefer recently griped that Eclipse on Mac "gets no love." I don't really agree in general, but I don't have the time to debate that in detail. I do, however, have the time to provide a simple work-around to one of his gripes, the inability to launch multiple copies of Eclipse simultaneously. As Doug mentions, this is inherent behavior for OS X applications, not an Eclipse-specific problem. But, there's a simple way to launch additional instances if you're willing to perform a few mouse clicks.
The basics:

1. Right-click (Command+click) on the Eclipse Doc icon and choose Show in Finder.
2. Right-click on Eclipse.app and choose Show Packages Contents.
3. Navigate to Contents > MacOS directory.
4. Double-click the eclipse executable there to launch Eclipse. Make sure to select a different workspace than is already open.

Here's a short screencast demonstration (click the image to play):

The best $5 I Ever Spent on Technology

I recently discovered xGestures and someone had better tell my wife because I'm in love!
I've been a long-time user of mouse gestures in Firefox (the plugin I currently use is FireGestures, but there are others). I recently changed to a combination of Camino and Safari, but there aren't any really good gestures plugins available for them.
My search led me to xGestures, and it truly is the best $5 I've ever spent on a piece of technology. Not only does it make my browser more productive (or rather, almost as productive as Firefox on Windoze), but as an added bonus it applies mouse gestures to every application. It's an amazing productivity boost.
For those who aren't familiar with mouse gestures, they are an alternative input mechanism whereby you combine a mouse click with dragging motions in order to trigger a command or action. Basic drag-and-drop is, essentially, a mouse gesture (one that every personal computer user is familiar with); the iPhone and iPod Touch use gestures quite extensively. I've heard them described as "controlling your applications by drawing little mini-pictures with your mouse." Wikipedia introduces them like this:

In computing, a mouse gesture is a way of combining computer mouse movements and clicks which the software recognizes as a specific command. Mouse gestures can provide quick access to common functions of a program. They can also be useful for people who have difficulties typing on a keyboard. For example, in a web browser, the user could navigate to the previously viewed page by pressing the right mouse button, moving the mouse briefly to the left, then releasing the button.

[full article]

For those like me who make heavy use of the mouse, the productivity boost gained by not having to find menu items or awkward keyboard combinations is outstanding. If you've never used mouse gestures before, it's probably kind of hard to understand the value unless you try them out.
As I've said, I'm in love with xGestures on my MacBook, but there are also similar programs for Windows. I haven't tried any of them out, but some that look promising are:

• gMote
• StrokeIt
• MaZZicK

So, Planet Eclipse readers are probably asking why this is showing up there... Well, I haven't yet configured xGestures to do anything in Eclipse, but I'm thinking about it. Sometime today I'll set up some gestures for the things I do most frequently in Eclipse (like open the Find Type and Find Resource dialogs). But I'm curious if anyone else uses gestures in Eclipse and, if so, what gestures do you use frequently? I'm interested in exploring the power of combining the best IDE and this great "new" input method to make me even more productive. Eventually I'd like to explore the possibility of writing an Eclipse plugin that adds gesture support and contributing it for inclusion in the platform.

Also, if any Windows users have other gestures programs that you like, let us know.

Mac OS X and Eclipse Debugger's "Drop To Frame"

After years of using it, I've become dependent on the debugger feature, Drop To Frame (described here, here, and here). Briefly, it allows you to select any level (frame) in the call stack during debugging and force the JVM to rollback to that point. It's a little difficult to explain briefly, but trust me when I say that once you've used it you quickly learn to depend on it.

So you can imagine my dismay when I recently started doing all of my Eclipse work on Mac OS X and discovered that Drop To Frame is disabled. It is a feature that not all JVMs support (specifically, those prior to Java 1.4), but I just can't believe that the modern Mac JVMs don't (I've tried running my apps in both Java 5 and Java 6 JVMs).
I asked about this on the Eclipse newsgroups/forums and on IRC, but no response so far. I'm hoping that the blogosphere might have some more insight...

Update: it seems that Drop to Frame is enabled sometimes, but only part-way down the stack, and sometimes not at all. The app I'm debugging has no native code in it, so that's not the culprit in this case. So I'm still looking for some insight into what enables/disables the feature.

Screencast: Creating an Eclipse download package "from scratch"

UPDATE: As of Service Release 1 (SR1) of Eclipse Galileo (aka, 3.5.1) the process described in this screencast is no longer necessary for 64-bit Mac OS X builds. 64-bit Cocoa builds of all the download packages are now available directly from the Eclipse downloads page.


If the cave you've been living in does not have Internet service, then perhaps it will come as news to you that Galileo was successfully released last week. It's a truly impressive feat to release so reliably so many projects year after year - you'd think that corporate internal and consumer software projects would take note and figure out what it is that enables the yearly release train to succeed when so many projects deliver late, over budget, or not at all. But, I digress...

Being a recent immigrant to the Nation of Mac, I was among the glad to see the Cocoa port graduate from incubation. However, all is not 100% happy in Eclipse+Mac land. The Eclipse Packaging Project (EPP), the small group that produces those easily consumable downloads, the themed packages of plug-ins built on top of the core platform, has limited resources. And with limited people, they can not produce the packages for every hardware/OS platform on which Eclipse is known to run. Of particular interest to me is the conspicuous absence of EPP package builds for 64-bit OS X. After some discussion, it appears we the community can't make a 64-bit build happen until the first "service release" of Galileo, sometime in the Fall. I'm disappointed, but I (mostly) understand the position that EPP is in.

So, what do we do if we want to make full use of all the 64-bit goodness of our operating system and Java 6 JVM? Well, it turns out that re-constructing the EPP packages from the "base platform" SDK is not all that difficult. Ekke Gentz has already blogged some text+picture instructions; my screencast below brings the process to life.

Note: the URL of the EPP update site used in the screencast is

http://download.eclipse.org/technology/epp/packages/galileo/

UPDATE: The package downloads page has been updated so that the Mac 64-bit SDK download is available directly, rather than having to go through the "Other Downloads" page. This makes the process a bit simpler than what is demonstrated in the screencast. If you're following this process for 64-bit Cocoa on OS X, you can get the Platform SDK directly in the Eclipse Classic section, as shown here (click to enlarge):