I recently moved from geany to Aptana as I'm working on some bigger projects and felt I would benefit from a full IDE.
One feature I'm really missing is the little grey line every four spaces to help me maintain indentation consistency. Does anything like this exist for Aptana/Eclipse?
get the PDT tools Indent Guide plugin
Under
Preferences -> General -> Editor -> Texteditor you can activate "Show whitespace characters". If you click on "whitespace characters", you can define, which character should be displayed. Here you can active "Tabs". It's not as good as the lines from Notepad++, but better than nothing.
You can set a print margin indicator (vertical line) in Preferences > General > Editors > Text Editors - but this would only be a single line. You could use tabs instead of spaces - there are options to insert spaces when you use the Tab key. In this same menu, you can choose to show whitespace characters, which will help keep your spacing in order. I don't know of any grid options.
Related
I am using Eclipse Luna. I have installed the Perl EPIC plugin. I want to indent 4 spaces instead of TAB.
I have checked Window -> Preferences -> General -> Editors -> Text Editors -> Insert spaces for tabs, but still when there is need to auto indent a new line, Eclipse still indents with TAB instead of spaces.
How do I change it so EPIC will use spaces instead of tabs for indentation in Perl files?
Late answer but I ran into the same issue, found this post, and subsequently how to change the formatting settings for Perl EPIC in Eclipse.
From the main IDE workspace, click the Window menu and then choose Preferences.
Scroll down to Perl EPIC and expand it in the tree.
Click the Editor entry.
In the right panel under the Appearance tab, you can change your preferences for Insert tabs/spaces on indent and whether or not to use spaces instead of tabs.
I downloaded some code from the Internet, and the four-space indentation is bugging the crap out of me. I tried to do a find and replace for "<4 spaces>" and replace it with "\t", but that just replaced all sets of spaces with the string "\t". How would I put a tab in the "replace" box?
Open Window->Preferences from menu bar.
Select Text Editors from tree menu.
Uncheck Insert spaces for tabs.
After that, run Format menu from context menu and save the file:
I figured it out. I just check the box that says "use regular expressions", then use \t.
In answer to the second half of your question:
The reason why people like spaces more than tabs is consistency. If you have your editor set to show tabs as 4 spaces wide, and I have my editor set to show tabs as 8 spaces wide, the code we're writing will look different to each of us. That's okay until our mutual coworker forgets that we're using tabs and starts spacing his lines using 4 spaces. Now his code looks fine to you, but all the indentation is off to me.
Also, what happens when our work decides that lines should be 80 characters long, or 120 characters long? You'll happily code with 4 space tabs, and when it gets to my editor, I suddenly see some of your lines as too long.
Generally, it doesn't matter whether you use spaces or tabs, as long as you (and every person who works on your code) agrees on which to use, and how wide a tab character is.
I use 4 spaces everywhere, because it looks the same on every editor, every repository, when cated, and everywhere else.
Kouhei response is in the right track, but you'll need to change the options of the Java formatter if you want the auto formatter to use spaces (in the preferences, look for Java -> Code Style -> Formatter, create a new style from one of the existing one, and choose "always use spaces"). Then, Ctrl + Shift + F will remove the tabs and insert spaces.
To resolve the issue of tab with space in the Eclipse editor:
Menu Window --> Preferences --> Java --> Code style --> Formatter
Click on configure project specific settings.
Choose the project
Check Enable project-specific settings
Click on New
Mention your profile name --> click OK.
The profile page will be popped up
Choose Space only under tab policy label of the indentation tab.
Click apply and the OK.
Use Ctrl + Shift + F to format a Java class which will replace tab with space.
Eclipse Helios for C++ developers
Instead of changing the default text editor, change the Code Style/Edit -> see pictures
I am using Adobe's ColdFusion Builder, an Eclipse-based IDE built on top of Aptana.
All of a sudden, I am getting a type of whitespace marker showing in my Eclipse Editor. I must have accidentally hit a key combination.
Here is a screen dump.
I have already tried "General > Editors > Text Editors > Show whitespace characters" and it is not this. I already have show whitespace characters turned off. If I turn it on, then the Whitespace Characters display over the top of what I am already seeing.
Can anyone tell me how this can be turned off? Most annoying.
Many Thanks
It's under Preferences -> General -> Editors -> Text Editors
Just uncheck 'Show Whitespace Characters':
Did you try Restarting Eclipse? If that didn't work, you might try this http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.faqs/ka11640.html which explains which file to delete to force eclipse to revert to use default settings.
I have done this several times by accidentally hitting some keystrokes.
If you go to Windows/Preferences/General/Keys you will see all the keyboard shortcuts you have.
Mine is set to Control + .
(that's a period by the way) I had to place my cursor inside the document and do it a couple of times to make it work because there is also a keyboard shortcut for Control +
On a Mac it is Cmd +.
Hope that helps.
Does anyone know what these really annoying boxes surrounding random code are in Eclipse? I've seen them come, go, grab the beginning and end of a word, I have no idea what they are supposed to mean. I'd really like to turn off the "feature" or figure out what they mean at least. Thanks!
This is for Aptana 3.2.1 on Mac, working with HTML.
To disable the boxes that encompass entire matching html tags:
preferences > general > editors > html tag pair occurrences; then uncheck "text as box."
Then, to disable the boxes around the matching angle brackets themselves:
preferences > aptana studio > editors; then uncheck "colorize matching character pairs.
If you are working in Windows with Aptana studio 3 you can turn it off this way:
Window > Preferences > General > Editors > Text Editors > Annotations
Inside there you find a box and select HTML Tag Pair Occurrences. Uncheck the box Text as.
However you also loose the good thing you get when you select a tag and it shows the matching tag. That's why I don't uncheck the box. Instead I chose Text as Vertical bar. It is easier to look at. Maybe you will also have to fiddle with Occurrences in the Annotations menu.
I think this is very bad done when they developed Aptana Studio. Who wants those default boxes? But I really do want to have the matching tag selected when I select one of them.
Somehow I've turned on hidden characters in Eclipse. It's not the "whitespace" characters in the general editor preferences. When turned on, it adds another layer of hidden characters over the existing ones.
Then I have things like
\r\n
Does anyone know what these are and how to remove them?
It is under Preferences > General > Editors > Text Editors. There is a checkbox labeled "Show whitespace characters". If you uncheck this the editor switches back to normal.
If you click on the link (whitespace characters) (<= v3.6) or (configure visibility) (>= v3.7) in this line you will get a popup window, in which you can define which characters eclipse is supposed to consider as whitespace characters.
In this popup window you also get the option to define the transparency in which each whitespace character is displayed in the editor, which you can use to (indirectly) change their foreground colour. I'm just mentioning it here, because it took me about half an hour to find this setting! ;-)
There is a toggle button 'Show Whitespace Chars' on the Eclipse toolbar
A great tip about using 'quick access' from eclipse forum:
CTRL+3 swc
Allows to turn them on and off
The right shortcut is Ctrl + N
UPDATE From Eclipse 3.7 version, something is changed... Now you have to go to:
Window > Preferences > General > Editors > Text Editors
CTRL + . does the job.
For Aptana Users
To toggle hidden characters in Aptana on and off, use the following keyboard shortcut:
Ctrl+Alt+W
I am using Eclipse Oxygen and can see this option to toggle whitespace characters:
It is actually in two places...
Sandkastenliga points out the obvious one, but you can also show white space with a shortcut key combination. The key combination is separate from the text editor preferences and will superimpose additional characters when active (it uses \r and \n for carriage return an line feed respectively instead of the symbols used by the text editor preference.)
Go to preferences > general > keys and look for the binding for the 'Show Whitespace' command.
I have the text editor preference turned on, so I removed the binding for this command altogether (it was set to Ctrl+. in my profile) to prevent accidental activation as it doesn't affect the other preference.
Go to Window > Preferences > General > Editors > Text Editors
Uncheck the "Show whitespace characters" option on the right side of the page, then click "Apply" at the bottom of the page.
Since this is not a standard setting, it could be the result of one of your extra plugin.
Did you try starting your eclipse with the -clean parameter?
Do you reproduce the issue with a fresh Eclipse installation?
Go to Preferences > General > Editors > Text Editors and restore defaults.
I have done this several times by accidentally hitting some keystrokes.
If you go to Windows/Preferences/General/Keys you will see all the keyboard shortcuts you have.
Mine is set to Control + .
I had to place my cursor inside the document and do it a couple of times to make it work because there is also a keyboard shortcut for Control +
Hope that helps.
You can add "Show Whitespace Characters" button in toolbar by customizing your perspective.
It also contains buttons to toggle word wrap, and toggle selection mode.
Go to Window > Perspective > Customize Perspective > Action Set Availability, then select "Editor Presentation" action set:
This works in Eclipse Neon.
You can also add a key binding for this action.
Go to Preferences > General > Keys > "Show Whitespace Characters"
Sorry this is a bit vague but it's a while since i used Eclipse and i do not have it installed. I think this is it ..... in one of the menus you will find the Eclipse settings, there are two set's of settings, current project and overall Eclipse, you mat need to check them both. In there are various menus in tree form that allow you control the actions and look and feel. But some of them are nested so there is an overall control but some packages have their own options in a sub menu set. The menu's will expand when you click them and i'm afraid you need to walk through them all.
Eclipse > Preference > General > Editors > Text Editors > Show WhiteSpace characters.