How do I make an editor the default editor for all unknown files in Eclipse? - eclipse

I regularly open files of different types in Eclipse. For many types, Eclipse uses the system editor by default. I don't want this to happen. I want Eclipse to use the built-in Text Editor for unknown file types. However all I can find are options to set the default editor for a certain file type, but not for all unknown ones. Is there an option to do this?


I don't think you can do this in one swoop, however:
Windows > Preferences > General > Editors > File Association.
If you don't have a LOT of unknown file types, just type *.junk, *.punk, *.clunck and add Text Editor as the default editor.
Sadly you can't use *.* here.


This issue with file associations is something that has always annoyed me with Eclipse. It is specially frustrating if you are trying to use Eclipse to edit files that don't have a file extension because then you can't even set a editor.
I searched over the Eclipse bug database and found my exact issue there. It was first reported in 2003 and up until now there is no solution for it. If you follow the long comment track over the years you will see that there is no way of setting a default editor for unknown file types. From what I gathered the problem boils down to eclipse not looking at the content of file to try to determine the type. Instead it fully depends on the file extension.
Some people have made suggestions for fixes but again nothing has come out of that. If you search the bug tracker DB you will find a lot more bugs created around this.


A clean solution to this is finally implemented in Eclipse.
On the Preferences > General > Editors > File Association page, you can now define an editor selection strategy for unassociated file types.
Source: https://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/news/4.6/platform.php#text-editor-selection-strategy


There is an Eclipse plugin that overrides the default behavior of the platform and opens text file of unknown type in the plain text editor of Eclipse instead in an external editor.
https://github.com/eclipselabs/default-text-editor

Related

How to open *.xml.dist with eclipse XML editor

I want to associate any *.xml.dist file with the eclipse XML editor. I tried the following:
Preferences: General > Editors > File Associations, yet it only accepts one dot here, so *.xml.dist can't be added (at least not for me? is there a trick?)
Preferences: General > Content Types I located Text > XML and added .xml.dist and *.xml.dist yet neither of them worked.
For sure, I can right click any file and tell Open with > XML Editor but I'd rather have this as default.
PS. The same would be for *.ext.dist (generic example here)
Thanks for help.

It looks like quite an old bug (ouch!) - https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=168573
Wouldn't creating a mapping for *.dist help you?
I have also noticed that Eclipse appears to remember what was the editor used for given one file, so if the set of files you are working with is finite, it might be an useful crutch.

Is it possible to open a file named feature.xml in the XML Editor of Eclipse?

I have project in Eclipse that contains a file named "feature.xml". If I open the file Eclipse uses the Feature Manifest Editor. In my case this file has nothing to do with Eclipses features and I simply want to open it in the XML Editor. If I try this I get a dialog informing me of "Unsupported content type in editor."
I have tried various combinations of Content Type and File Association in the Preferences but am unable to get anywhere.
Is it possible to open a file named feature.xml in the XML Editor of Eclipse?
I am using Kepler.

No, there's a low-level bug in the XML Editor that the PDE editors are side-stepping. This causes the error message you see to appear. original bug It may have been fixed in the interim, but there would need to be a thorough review to make sure the original issues didn't resurface.

Eclipse syntax coloring settings gone.

I use customized syntax coloring for my Eclipse editor and it has reverted back to the default settings. This is the second time in a couple weeks that it has happened. Any ideas as to why this is happening or how I can get my custom settings back? I have a very specific coloring scheme that I like to use and it takes forever to manually set!

Are you switching across workspaces? As I understand eclipse preferences are stored in .settings/ present in workspace's root directory.
I export eclipse preferences and import it when I switch workspaces. Another cool trick I found is to close projects when I do not use them.
Eclipse official link on how to export preferences:
http://help.eclipse.org/juno/index.jsp?topic=%2Forg.eclipse.platform.doc.user%2Ftasks%2Ftimpandexp.htm

Sometimes simply import/export would not be enough, so you may need a list of .pref files where the syntax coloring settings are stored. What I have here is not complete and I just list what I use and I hope it helps.
(I process .java, .jsp, .xml, js and .properties files.)
You can find them by searching .pref files in your workspace. Remember to adjust your searching options to look into subfolders.
org.eclipse.ui.editors.prefs
org.eclipse.jdt.ui.prefs
org.eclipse.ui.workbench.prefs
org.eclipse.wst.xml.ui.prefs
org.eclipse.jst.jsp.ui.prefs
org.eclipse.wst.html.ui.prefs
org.eclipse.wst.jsdt.ui.prefs
org.eclipse.ant.ui.prefs
org.eclipse.datatools.sqltools.sqleditor.prefs
org.eclipse.debug.ui.prefs
org.eclipse.php.ui.prefs
com.adobe.flexide.mxml.core.prefs
org.python.pydev.prefs
com.adobe.flexide.as.core.prefs
com.adobe.flexide.css.core.prefs
org.codehaus.groovy.eclipse.ui.prefs
org.epic.perleditor.prefs
org.eclipse.cdt.ui.prefs
You may copy them when you finish adjusting your syntax coloring settings. When needed, search .pref again to get access to their locations, and restore your settings by copying the lines with color code, in order to avoid unpredictable side effect. As I can see this is the only way, inconvenient buy effective.

how to switch/control syntax highlighting in eclipse flexibly?

I have a file with extension .xml.
But it doesn't necessarily contain XML. It may also contain HTML and JavaScript. Now I would like to either have Eclipse decide inteligently/heuristically which syntax highlighting would be appropriate or to switch it myself.
Any ideas?

Eclipse associates files with an editor. You can let eclipse decide which editor to use (e.g. defaults per file extension) or select the editor by yourself. I guess you might already know that or have at least experienced it.
Syntax highlighting isn't always set seperately but instead part of some editor (together with stuff like keyboard shortcuts). So what you are going to need is an editor that behaves the way you want it to. I do not know if there is an editor like this available but one options is writing an eclipse plug-in and implementing such an editor.
Fortunately there are great editors for each of XML, javascript, HTML, etc that are all open source. I guess you might be able to use some of their code. Ideally as a client of their API / Objects or if it won't work out just by reusing code.

short answer: not possible. use PHPStorm instead :)

Eclipse syntax highlighting preferences save and restore

I spend some time customizing the colors for syntax highlighting in Eclipse (Java, JSP, HTML, CSS, etc.) but whenever I try to export these settings via File|Export|General|Preferences and reimport them, the settings never completely get imported back. Some colors are restored and others are left unchanged, leaving me in an 'in between' state - very frustrating.
I'm using Eclipse 3.4 Ganymede, by the way.
Has anyone found a reliable way to save and restore Eclipse syntax highlighting settings?

I finally figured out how to do this.
I just wanted to mention beforehand that I did try to start with a fresh Eclipse install, export the preferences to a .epf file, change just one single setting, export again, and compare the files. To my surprise, trying to import settings from a minimal .epf file did not work reliably either.
The solution that worked for me was to copy these files: {Eclipse workspace directory}/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/*.prefs
I tried a fresh Eclipse install on another machine and after copying those files over, all my settings were restored perfectly.

The solution was to copy SOME - not all - of the files from {workspace}/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/*.prefs into my other workspace.
In particular (per the https://stackoverflow.com/questions/96981/color-themes-for-eclipse thread):
org.eclipse.jdt.ui.prefs = Syntax Coloring
org.eclipse.ui.editors.prefs = Text Editors
Copying other files caused things to break.
There are a couple of notes to add:
I had to copy the aforementioned pair of files several times before I got the correct syntax coloring.
Be sure to close the workspace, if it's open in Eclipse, before copying the files.
This worked with Eclipse Helios.

If you want to be a little more fine grained on what you migrate, the syntax highlighting rules are the lines starting with semanticHighlighting on workspace-indigo/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/org.eclipse.jdt.ui.prefs
Doing this, I was able to migrate my syntax highlighting from Helios to Indigo

I'm using JBoss Developer Studio 10 with the Eclipse Neon 4.6 engine.
All .prefs files are inside this path:
/workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.sett‌​ings
Update: I found a similar structure on this path too:
\RedHat\JBossDev\studio\configuration\.settings
It's my IDE folder plus \configuration\.settings
I recommend search for org.eclipse.*ui*.prefs instead *.prefs to refine your result.
The principal config files are:
org.eclipse.jdt.ui.prefs
Java Syntax Color Settings
org.eclipse.ui.editors.prefs
Text Editor Settings
org.eclipse.cdt.ui.prefs
Formatter Settings
org.eclipse.wst.jsdt.ui.prefs
JavaScript Syntax Color Settings
org.eclipse.jst.jsp.ui.prefs
org.eclipse.wst.css.ui.prefs
org.eclipse.wst.html.ui.prefs
org.eclipse.wst.json.ui.prefs
org.eclipse.wst.dtd.ui.prefs
org.eclipse.wst.xml.ui.prefs
org.eclipse.wst.xsl.ui.prefs
If have a problematic workspace:
Copy the files above
Create a new workspace
Copy and Replace that files in your new workspace
This will recover perfectly your custom editors color settings. For me worked very well.

Eclipse CDT stores 'Syntax coloring' in the file org.eclipse.cdt.ui.prefs
This is located for example here: C:\eclipse\workspace.metadata.plugins\org.eclipse.core.runtime.settings\
Copy and paste over the top of the one in your new eclipse instance. This worked for me when moving from 3.4 to 3.5

I would export the preference before modifying the color, and then after.
That way, you would be able to isolate the specific rules of an eclipse preference file into one smaller file and:
check if some colors not restored are indeed represented by a rule
the import of a smaller preference has any effect on the previously unchanged settings.
That kind of strategy can be further refined into several small settings files (one for Java, one for JSP, HTML, CSS, ...), in order to better analyzing the potential side-effects when re-importing those settings.

I have had success in importing Eclipse Helios's syntax highlighting rules by copying the file:
.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/org.eclipse.jdt.ui.prefs
from the source workspace to the target workspace. It seems this file also contains Eclipse's code formatter profiles and code templates.
Environment:
Version: Helios Release
Build id: 20100617-1415
(on linux)

Once Michael Bosworth's answer helped me to some extend and I voted up. But now I see some obligation to answer it myself, because copying these two files are not enough. Let me explain why.
First, these files contains lines irrevelente to syntax coloring.
Second, syntax coloring for other editors are located elsewhere, for example, those of XML files are in
org.eclipse.wst.xml.ui.prefs
and those of HTML files:
org.eclipse.wst.html.ui.prefs
JSP pages?
org.eclipse.jst.jsp.ui.prefs
, etc.
Third, when we change font colors, usually we change background colors, line highlighting colors, etc. to get a clearer view of codes. This involves more files.
If we search *.pref files in path
/workspace/.metadata/.plugins
we can find all preferences files where we can locate all lines of coloring settings. But by copy-pasting all these files to another workspace can also trigger problems, for they are not exclusively syntax-coloring-related. Moreover, when we are switching between two versions of Eclipse, unexpected problems may arise.
So, the safest way is:
Create a new workspace if you don't have one.
Open all *.pref files we find in the workspace one by one,
Copy those lines containing color codes,
Find the same file in your new workspace,
Replace the color part by existing one. Or, set the colors in Eclipse, by assuming the corresponding options according to properties' name. All color codes are RGB based.
EDIT: (2017.02.24)
Eclipse Mars has a plugin Oomph, which can record your preference settings to provide seamless transmission of your preferences. When you activate it, every time you change a value, it prompts to ask you if you want to record it in Oomph, providing you the exact line in the corresponding file where your new value is stored. So, when you install Oomph, you can:
Change the settings of your font face, font size, background color, etc.
In the prompt windows of Oomph, take note of the location of your new settings. (Because if you tell Oomph to remember your settings, it will not prompt never again, so you may only see this windows once.)

I have deleted recently changed *.prefs file from the following dreictory \myworkspace.metadata.plugins\org.eclipse.core.runtime.settings\ and imported existing exported preference.
I am the first person, who answer for this question as per my knowledge :), Cause even I struggled lot.
Thanks

I faced the same problem few days ago.
The easiest way to restore the defaults is to import the default theme again, which you can find under:
http://eclipsecolorthemes.org/?view=theme&id=790