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There is currently no setting to change to font of the trees/menus/tabs that are displayed within the platform. For menus and tabs I guess a single platform-wide option would be enough. For the trees, maybe each tree should have its own font? Workaround: with GTK, I changed system settings.
I must add that the default (big) font in the trees is really a problem with "low" resolutions (Can't have more than 1024x768)
There are all OS fonts. Change your OS settings.
As I stated in the bug description, I know that changing the OS settings is a workaround to this issue. However, I do not want to change my system font, I am perfectly happy with their size. I want to change the size of Eclipse's fonts, because in this particular case their big size is inconvenient. Moreover, I feel that it is inconsistent to provide settings for changing the font for editors, consoles, etc., and not for package view, outline view, etc. I hope this bug will be reopened.
Eclipse uses platform look and feel for platform widgets. It was a design decision to honour your system settings. In cases where there was no appropriate system setting to use we make a setting for the SDK.
New and noteworthy features for build M7 states that the font of individual cells of trees and tables can be changed. So I guess there is no technical problem in providing a setting to change the package view's font (and that of other tree view). I think that in the case of this view honoring my system settings is not appropriate. I am using gnome, which by default shows filesystem trees with a rather big font, which I find fine. I do not spend the whole day navigating in my filesystem. However, I DO spend my whole day navigating within my hundreds of packages, and having them displayed with a big font is inconvenient.
There never was a technical problem. It was a design decision about Eclipse not changing your system settings unless required. We had considered a view font but feedback was strong enough against that we did not pursue it.
I performed a quick search in the eclipse.platform newsgroup, and found a few articles written by people that feel the way I do with respect to that problem. I included them below. Is it possible to vote for a bug marked as invalid? Josip Gracin wrote: > Is there any way to change the size of the font which is being used in the > Package Explorer, Navigator and other such tabs? I would prefer a smaller > font. > > > Yes, change the corresponding OS font. Dani ----------------------- Unbelievably, no on all counts. It was suggested to me last I mentioned it that I put in an Enhancement Request. Seems like of like suggesting that the app be made easy to use; kind of shocked that this is not a setting somewhere. Guillaume Pothier wrote: > Hi, > > I would like to use a smaller font for various of the trees that appear in eclipse (package explorer, debug views, etc). I did not find any setting for that. > I saw that the same question has been asked a few months ago in the newsgroup, but they have not been responded to. > Is there a way to do that now? > > Guillaume --------------------------- Narahari Lakshminarayana wrote: > Hello: > > I am able to successfully set the colors for the Java Editor to the colors > of my choice. > > Which ones. Color setting are in Preferences > Java > Editor (on several pages) > How can I set the colors of the navigator view of the Java Perspective. > I assume you mean the Package Explorer. The colors are those you've set on the OS level. You can change them there. Dani > I want to set dark background and yellow foreground color. > > Is it even possible, if so where can I get help. > > -Narahari > > > ------------------------------------ Ron Cordell wrote: >> Running Eclipse 3M5 on Linux, I can change the editor fonts and some >> other fonts via the Preferences dialogs. However, the fonts for some of >> the perspectives, such as the Explorer window are not affected and are >> really big. How do I change these fonts? >> >> Thanks, call 'gnome-font-preferences` regards Haris Peco ------------------------- Folks, I'm hoping this is the right place for this question, but a search of the news archives along with searching the web (in particular Sun's Java site) has given no answer to my question, and the problem is beginning to annoy me... The fonts in Eclipse seem to all be configurable, except for the ones used in the menus and for the tabs; on Solaris 9 (with Eclipse 2.1.1 and JDK 1.4.2), these fonts are just far too big for my liking. I've been told some settings in my Xdefaults file can change that, but my search so far has turned up nothing on what these settings would be. Could anyone please shed some light on this problem for me? Thank you... Ken Lareau elessar@numenor.org
I keep thinking this bug should be reopened. The issue is actually broader than just fonts: all colors should also be configurable. For instance, with M9-gtk on KDE, I cannot see anymore wich item is selected in the codeassist popup... and I have not been able to find which system color is involved. This is far more annoying that the font size issue!
It has always been the goal of Eclipse to honour system settings whenever possible - we try to only configure colours and fonts when there is no good or not enough systems choice(s). The pop up using SWT.INFO_BACKGROUND if that helps.
Well, having invisible selection in a list is definitely none of my system settings... No KDE or Gnome app on my system has this problem. As far as SWT.COLOR_INFO_BACKGROUND is concerned, it doesn't help me much, as I have no "tooltip background area" setting in KDE desktop configuration tool. I started gnome-control-center to see if I can access such an option, but the only possibility I have to change the look of the controls is to choose a theme, so I would have to try all available themes until I find one that permits to properly display the completion list... and possibly breaks another GUI aspect... I think this is quite a serious issue. If there is really no way that you accept to let the user choose to override system settings in Eclipse (position which I find quite undefendable, see below), there should be at least a way to alter system settings directly within Eclipse, using the Eclipse terminology, I mean, how could a user guess that the background of the selected item in the completion list is drawn using the "tooltip background area" color? Now here is why I think users should be able to override system settings in Eclipse. - In my day to day use, I see my system settings used in the file manager, in the multimedia apps, maybe the web browser... Those apps typically display much less information than eclipse. And when it is not the case, for example in the web browser, I can choose to use a larger or smaller font; in Mozilla I have a checkbox that says "use system colors". So I can CHOOSE if I want to use my system colors. - I use KDE. Eclipse takes its "system settings" in the GNOME config. These are NOT my system settings - Eclipse already provides settings to alter font/colors of the editors, consoles... providing these settings in some areas and not in others is inconsistent. Moreover, the new look and feel provides a lot of overriding of platform look and feel (as it has been largely discussed in the newsgroup). So why keep such a rigid position on very minor settings when some settings are overridden a lot more?
I completely agree to this... many complex programms allow to modify the color/font schemata of the operation system, so eclipse should provide this option too.
Guillaume, the problem of unselected tree views having the wrong colour was recently fixed in KDE CVS by Lubos Lunak. See this bug: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79464 It was a usability problem with KDE's generated themes for Gtk+.
Actually now that I say that, I am less sure if the fix I mentioned addresses this specific issue. The krdb.cpp code in kcontrol/krdb is tricky. You may wish to file another bug on the KDE bug tracker about this.
Billy, thanks, but this used to work with M8, on the same config
Guillaume, thanks, I took a better look at the code assist. I filed bug 64861, as I think it was a bit off-topic for what this bug was originally about.
Guillame if you look at Bug 64861 what you are seeing is new behaviour in content assist that is causing some colour problems. We still try to avoid messing with system colours in general but if you find a place where we are and it is causing you trouble please let us know. Thanks for your help.
There is a broader use case for this. If you have a requirement to set a different font/color for a product, which happens all the time, you expect there should be a plugin like 'theme' to override the default OS fonts/colors. It makes sense to offer an interception to reset the defualt behaviour of OS, through a plugin like 'theme'. Currently 'theme' support only overriding 4 areas defined in JFace resources. Event if we want to honour the OS look and feel, how do you battle this usecase?
I think it should honor the OS settings by default but let the user override them so you can have different fonts in Eclipse if you choose. As it is, you can override most of the fonts in Eclipse but not all of them - it's inconsistent. I ran into this problem when preparing a demo of Eclipse. I wanted to make all of Eclipse's fonts bigger but couldn't. I didn't want to change the settings on all of Windows because that's known to cause problems in some apps (text larger than expected in 3rd party software's dialog layouts for example). I'm not sure I have an "official" vote to spare, but: +1 to reopen for reconsideration in 3.3.
*** Bug 68569 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Guillaume Pothier is absolutly right. It's nonsense not to have these setttings and GREAT usability issue. I can't really believe someone doesn't get this... Please reopen this.
I would like to support Guillaume and the other developers and would vote for reopening this issue.
14 years and this *obvious* *bug* has not been fixed. arrogance of developers not hearing their users' feedback is what makes the users migrate to another software. just saying...
I can't believe people have raised this issue 16 years ago. I am also disappointed with the attitude of developers in recognizing this issue. It's still a problem. I am using a 24-inch screen and Eclipse UI font is too small. I am perfectly ok with the OS font being the size they are. This looks like the perfect example of developers deciding what users need and not the users. In this case, even with feedback. Perhaps this is not a cool feature to work on for open source developers and they will not get any glory out of this.
The original sender’s mistake is to mix menus, tabs, and their contents in a single request. This allowed the request to be rejected as "the goal of Eclipse to match the system settings" in 2004. And ignore the problem for the past 16 years. The main medicine that we are offered is a change in system fonts. This is not a good recipe. Firstly, on a remote Windows desktop (for example) this is not possible. Secondly, the latest versions of Eclipse support themes, it is also possible to change the font of dialogs, but we still cannot change the fonts in the views. Let's leave the menu bar and popup menu alone. Even schemes do not change their appearance. For tabs, you can change the "Part Header Font" I did not find standard ways to change fonts for content (except editors). But I found a place to hack it: (recipe for Neon 3.3, probably should be updated for latest versions) org.eclipse.e4.ui.internal.workbench.swt.PartRenderingEngine protected Object createWidget(MUIElement element, Object parent) { AbstractPartRenderer renderer = getRenderer(element, parent); if (renderer != null) { // Remember which renderer is responsible for this widget element.setRenderer(renderer); Object newWidget = renderer.createWidget(element, parent); if (newWidget != null) { //>>>>>>>>>>>>>> start if(newWidget instanceof Control){ Dialog.applyDialogFont(((Control) newWidget)); } //>>>>>>>>>>>>>> end renderer.bindWidget(element, newWidget); return newWidget; } } return null; } This apply dialog font to new widget. Works fine in most views. You will need to adjust dialog font and probably Git fonts changed/ignored resources, because they have own setting based on system font.
