Programming fonts

Apr 19, 2013 by

It is a matter of preference, no doubt, but most developers I know prefer monospaced fonts. So what are the best ones to be used?

Over the years, I’ve tried numerous fonts and the few that work good are Monaco, Menlo, and finally Ubuntu Mono. Menlo is a great font that comes with OS X and is used in X-Code. It is also the best font so far that I found to use with Eclipse.

I have recently tried to work with Sublime Text 2. I have used TextWrangler before but Sublime seems so much more powerful out of the box. I read somewhere that it is possible to setup TextWrangler with various plugins and extensions to make it quite powerful too, but Sublime Text comes already quite powerful out of the box and just feels more natural. TextWrangler never really felt natural to me but it was the best option I had so far as it had more options than Smultron.

So I tried Ubuntu Mono with Sublime Text but it looks almost the same as Menlo and since I am using Menlo with Eclipse already (Ubuntu Mono regular was horrible in Eclipse) I decided to keep using Menlo despite many praises towards Ubuntu Mono. But Ubuntu might be a good alternative for other OSes that do not have the Menlo bundled with it.

Happy coding!

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Eclipse.ini garbage collector (GC) settings

Sep 6, 2012 by

Garbage collection in Eclipse

There are several GC options available for eclipse’s optimization. Try which one works best for you

The (original) copying collector (Enabled by default). When this collector kicks in, all application threads are stopped, and the copying collection proceeds using one thread (which means only one CPU even if on a multi-CPU machine). This is known as a stop-the-world collection, because basically the JVM pauses everything else until the collection is completed.

The parallel copying collector (Enabled using -XX:+UseParNewGC). Like the original copying collector, this is a stop-the-world collector. However this collector parallelizes the copying collection over multiple threads, which is more efficient than the original single-thread copying collector for multi-CPU machines (though not for single-CPU machines). This algorithm potentially speeds up young generation collection by a factor equal to the number of CPUs available, when compared to the original singly-threaded copying collector.

The parallel scavenge collector (Enabled using -XX:UseParallelGC). This is like the previous parallel copying collector, but the algorithm is tuned for gigabyte heaps (over 10GB) on multi-CPU machines. This collection algorithm is designed to maximize throughput while minimizing pauses. It has an optional adaptive tuning policy which will automatically resize heap spaces. If you use this collector, you can only use the the original mark-sweep collector in the old generation (i.e. the newer old generation concurrent collector cannot work with this young generation collector).

Speeding up Eclipse

If you want more information on how to speed up eclipse on OS X – read this post: How To speed up Eclipse on OS X

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How to upgrade Eclipse Indigo to Eclipse Juno 4.2

Aug 10, 2012 by

It is possible to update Eclipse Indigo to the new Eclipse Juno while preserving your settings and (well, hopefully) everything else. Note that some plugins may not support the new Juno release yet, so consult your specific plugins release notes and updates to check this. Also make sure you make a backup of your Eclipse installation – just zip/tar the whole folder and if something goes wrong you should be able to just unzip/untar it back to its original location like nothing happened.

Add new sites to my “Available Software Sites” (Help -> Install New Software -> Available Software Sites)

http://download.eclipse.org/releases/juno
http://download.eclipse.org/tools/cdt/releases/juno

 

 

Then just initiate an update (help -> install updates).

After the update

http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/4.2

 had been added

http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.7

 had been disabled

http://download.eclipse.org/tools/cdt/releases/indigo

 had been disabled

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Fixing Eclipse fonts on OS X

Feb 16, 2012 by

Select the right font:

 

Turn off anti aliasing:

In the terminal run:

defaults write org.eclipse.eclipse AppleAntiAliasingThreshold 20

 

Fix eclipse.ini:

edit $ECLIPSE_HOME » Eclipse.app » Contents » MacOS » eclipse.ini and remove the following line:

-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts

 
 

End Result

The end result should look something like this:
 

  

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Installing/Updating BlackBerry Eclipse SDK – problem with authentication

Dec 14, 2011 by

If you are getting an error similar to the error below while trying to install and/or update BlackBerry SDK as a plugin for Eclipse

An error occurred while collecting items to be installed session context was:
(profile=AppceleratorProfile, phase=org.eclipse.equinox.internal.p2.engine.phases.Collect, operand=, action=).
Unable to read repository at:
Unable to read repository at https://swdownloads.blackberry.com/Downloads/auth/contactFormPreload.do?code=
...

You are in luck!

Your problems are over as you found the solution. All you need to do is to clear the “Secure Storage” contents. To do that go to

Windows -> Preferences

Type secure, drill down to find the org.eclipse.equinox.p2.repository, expand this, and you will see the swdownloads.blackberry.com. Select this entry and delete it. This should resolve the issue next time you try to update/install the plugin you should be asked again for your credentials to the BlackBerry developer portal and once you put them in the installation should proceed normally.

Here’s how it looks in Eclipse:

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Eclipse marking SVN changes like Netbeans

Dec 9, 2011 by

Eclipse is a great tool that I have been using for mmm… wow (!!!) probably about 7 years now and the most amazing thing about it is of course all the plugins that can really extend the functionality of the basic editor and make it highly personalized. This is great, but some things should just be in a good IDE. Like built in SVN integration. Seriously, why do I need to install a plugin for something so basic? Netbeans is another great IDE, but I use it less as most my development environments come from dedicated Eclipse plugins and while it is possible to do the development in Netbeans it is not as convenient and straightforward and this is what we the pragmatic programmers usually prefer.

So one nice thing I got used to in Netbeans is how it colors the changes that I made in the editor if the file is under version control (e.g. SVN). After I used Netbeans for a while and got to like this feature, when I got back to Eclipse I kinda missed it. It’s nice and convenient. Quite non obtrusive i.e. it doesn’t get in your way – you may not even be noticing this if you don’t know about it.

Anyways, turns out that it is quite easy to enable similar functionality for Eclipse, alas you have to have SVN plugin I suppose for the “diff” to work. Just follow the screenshot if you want to enable coloring of SVN changes in Eclipse similar to Netbeans.

Here’s how it will look (you can change colors if you want)

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