I’ve been a long time eclipse user since 3.0. What has buggered me since that time is the mysterious toolbar – there is no way to turn it off! Since I think around eclipse 3.3 they added an option on the right click menu to “Hide Toolbar”, but that is only temporary. The toolbar creeps right back in on restart!
After some LONG time struggle with the eclipse PDE (Plug-in Development Environment), I finally rolled out this little plug-in that hides the toolbar for me on eclipse start up.
Man, I still cannot believe how much time it took to actually write a simple plug-in like this! Maybe that’s a reason why the eclipse plug-in scene hasn’t seen much advances lately – there’s too darn little resources! I mean, for the most of us, digging through API and classes manually aren’t the most pleasant thing to do.
Please go check out the Google Code project page or use this update site directly:
1 | <a href="http://kizzx2.com/eclipse/hide-toolbar/updates/">http://kizzx2.com/eclipse/hide-toolbar/updates/</a> |
P.S. I probably will write some ecilpse plug-in tutorials later, if I feel like it. So please stay tuned!
I’ve been looking for a plugin to do exactly this for some time and have just been too lazy to write it myself, so it’s very much appreciated. Two problems though:
1) On Windows it fails to enable the ‘Show Toolbar’ menu item, so I can only get the toolbar back by removing the plugin.
2) Doesn’t work on the OSX version of eclipse
Thanks for your feedback! I have to admit I haven’t tested it much and I mainly just use it for my own convenience.
I think I’ll look into the problems you described, especially #1 which might pose a problem for some people. (Question though: when would you actually want to get the Toolbar back?)
2 probably will have to wait since I don’t use OSX myself :p
It’s rare that I ever need to switch the toolbar back on, and when I do it’s usually because I’ve forgotten the hotkey to do what I want. It was only an accident that I noticed the menu option was missing at all; I had just happened to be in the ‘Window’ pull-down and something didn’t look quite right.
Thanks for the reply, and the work!