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.
Strange, I use Eclipse at least once a week and I have no idea what this question is asking. – surfasb – 2012-03-12T20:26:22.277
@surfasb I think Barta is referring to the shape of the tabs. Instead of being rectangles, they have sloped edges, similar to Google Chrome's tabs. – iglvzx – 2012-03-15T05:01:09.240
Yes, at first I thought that this is causing the loss of precious screen space, but I found a checkbox in the General/Appearance preferences to make it regular shaped, but that takes exactly the same space. Still, compared to NetBeans, or Firefox, or any application that uses tabs, Eclipse's tabs have much bigger paddings. :( – Tamás Barta – 2012-03-17T21:49:25.363