How can I make Eclipse to draw the tabs more likely the native ones?

Question

I don't really like the Eclipse IDE, since I found Netbeans much more usable, but Android development strongly encourages to do so. What my main problem with Eclipse is, that it's really ugly. Which would be no big deal, but I have a small screen, and it's filled with unnecessary paddings for tabs, and such. It would be much more usable if I could somehow force Eclipse to look more native. I ask this, because there were similar questions for older versions of Netbeans, or for versions on specific platforms, and solutions existed.

By the way I'm using Eclipse 3.7.0 from the Ubuntu 11.10 repositories.

Thanks for efforts!

Answer 1

Recently I came across gtkrc files, and I found articles that use gtkrc files to tailor Eclipse's look for different reasons, and these includes tooltip colours, and making tabs compact. And that's what I really wanted. So I found this article, where the main article makes tabs compact, and the first comment shows how to make tooltips readable with the same approach.

First, you have to create a gtkrc somewhere on your computer containing something similar:

gtk-color-scheme = "selected_text_color:#000000"
style "compact"
{
  GtkButton::default_border={0,0,0,0}
  GtkButton::default_outside_border={0,0,0,0}
  GtkButtonBox::child_min_width=0
  GtkButtonBox::child_min_heigth=0
  GtkButtonBox::child_internal_pad_x=0
  GtkButtonBox::child_internal_pad_y=0
  GtkMenu::vertical-padding=1
  GtkMenuBar::internal_padding=1
  GtkMenuItem::horizontal_padding=4
  GtkToolbar::internal-padding=1
  GtkToolbar::space-size=1
  GtkOptionMenu::indicator_size=0
  GtkOptionMenu::indicator_spacing=0
  GtkPaned::handle_size=4
  GtkRange::trough_border=0
  GtkRange::stepper_spacing=0
  GtkScale::value_spacing=0
  GtkScrolledWindow::scrollbar_spacing=0
  GtkExpander::expander_size=10
  GtkExpander::expander_spacing=0
  GtkTreeView::vertical-separator=0
  GtkTreeView::horizontal-separator=0
  GtkTreeView::expander-size=12
  GtkTreeView::fixed-height-mode=TRUE
  GtkWidget::focus_padding=0

  font_name="Liberation Sans,Sans Regular 8"
  text[SELECTED] = @selected_text_color
}
class "GtkWidget" style "compact"
style "compact2"
{
  xthickness=1
  ythickness=1
}
class "GtkButton" style "compact2"
class "GtkToolbar" style "compact2"
class "GtkPaned" style "compact2" 

They also complain about fonts, so this gtkrc changes fonts as well, which I removed, since I reduced font size in Gnome settings, and I was satisfied with that.

The first comment tells to append this to this gtkrc to make tooltips readable:

style "gnome-color-chooser-tooltips"
{
bg[NORMAL] = "#FFFFAF"
fg[NORMAL] = "#000000"
}
widget "gtk-tooltip*" style "gnome-color-chooser-tooltips"

After you saved the gtkrc, you have to make Eclipse run with the GTK2_RC_FILES environment variable containing the path to your gtkrc file. I achieved this by altering the /usr/share/applications/eclipse.desktop file to run eclipse.sh instead of eclipse, and I created eclipse.sh with the following content:

#!/bin/bash
export LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=0 # This disables overlay scrollbars, its my preference
export GTK2_RC_FILES=$GTK2_RC_FILES:/home/tamas/eclipse.gtkrc # This sets gtkrc file
eclipse

This made Eclipse almost perfect. I hope others will find it useful as well.

Answer 2

I use a plugin called "Extended VS Presentation". It's not exactly native, but there's less padding. There may be other appearance plugins that you could try, but that's the only one I've used.

Note that after you install it, you need to enable it in Window->Preferences->General->Appearance (change the "Current Presentation" to "Extended VS Presentation" and restart Eclipse).