Saturday, August 25, 2007

Eclipse Fonts in Linux

As you might have guessed I'm using Linux most of the times (Windows only seldom), but I noticed that the Eclipse font layout looked better in Windows: actually, the Eclipse font size in Windows permits fitting much more information in a view. This is even more crucial when I'm using my laptop with a resolution of 1280x800.

Of course, I had tried to adjust the font size using the Eclipse Preferences, and actually managed to reduce the size of the editors and view titles (also for dialogs), but not other fonts, such as menu fonts, and, more importantly, the size of tables and trees (e.g., the Java Package Explorer). That's actually due to the fact that under Linux Eclipse relies on Gtk, and thus inherits the preferences of the Gnome Desktop but I'm using KDE :-)

Fortunately, it's quite easy to adjust Gnome font settings even from KDE, by running gnome-control-center from the command line and then set the font size from there. Now, my eclipse shows much more information due to the reduced font size.

And by the way, this reduced the fonts also for other Gtk based applications I'm using, e.g., Thunderbird and Firefox!

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6 comments:

  1. Anonymous1:55 AM

    Very nice betto ! You're the first one, who gave me a solution for that problem and the reason, that i can now use eclipse under Linux ! Greetings from (a Croat in) Germany.

    ReplyDelete
  2. betto12:31 PM

    Hi there! Glad you liked the solution :-)

    However, this seems to be a temporary one, since each time you restart KDE you should also call the GNOME configurator :-(

    This other solution seems better: http://tronprog.blogspot.com/2007/08/eclipse-fonts-in-linux-part-2.html

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous8:35 AM

    In Ubuntu you can use the System menu / Preferences / Appearance / Fonts tab to set application and window title fonts size.

    I have been looking to solve this Eclipse package explorer issue for a long time. Very much appreciated. Thanks

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous5:41 PM

    thanks a lot I was being driven crazy on this...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous11:37 AM

    thank you very much!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous11:22 AM

    Another solution:
    http://techtavern.wordpress.com/2008/09/24/smaller-font-sizes-for-eclipse-on-linux/

    ReplyDelete