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It would be great to have a way to make Eclipse save as much space as possible in the UI in order to have more space for what is in the editors and views. Some users find that there is a lot of wasted space which makes it hard to see the important things. This is especially true for users coming from text editors such as Vim. There are several things that could be done for this but the idea would be do sacrifice some cosmetic in favor of screen estate. Some ideas: - Tab height: Reduce the tab width to something much smaller, but big enough to be able to read the text - Sash width: The sash between editors and views could be reduced to a minimum: 1 pixel. However, moving the mouse over the sash would allow moving the sash over more than 1 pixel. - Scollbars: On some systems, scollbars allocate space which takes away space that could be used for view and editor content. On recent GTK3 and Mac, there are "overlay" scollbars that only appear while scrolling. This is a great improvement that should be consistent on all platforms. - Overview ruler: The ruler allocates space to show annotations. Instead, the overview ruler could be overlaid on top of the editor text and have some transparency. Other ideas? I can also open sub-bugs if there is an agreement that some of those ideas should be tried out.
This is a great idea, as I also think that a lot of space is a bit wasted in the Eclipse IDE. If you have 3 or 4 views on the same row in Eclipse, all the scrollbars take a lot of space in that specific row. If by "overlay scrollbars" you mean scrollbars like in Visual Studio code, that would be a lot better already. Otherwise just reducing their width to a minimum would be better too (like in the text editor Atom). As for the tab heights, something can definitely be done here. Eclipse tabs could definitely be "slimmer". Several views in a column end up having their tabs take up too much space, a bit like the scrollbars but in the vertical space. This is a big +1 from me, this would definitely help in making the IDE feel more modern and usable.
Created attachment 264902 [details] GTK3 overlay scrollbars (In reply to Patrick-Jeffrey Pollo Guilbert from comment #1) > If you have 3 or 4 views on the same row in Eclipse, all the scrollbars take > a lot of space in that specific row. If by "overlay scrollbars" you mean > scrollbars like in Visual Studio code, that would be a lot better already. > Otherwise just reducing their width to a minimum would be better too (like > in the text editor Atom). Can you add a screen shot for the Visual Studio code scrollbars? I added one for what I mean by overlay scrollbars (GTK3)
You may also be interested in looking at this which helps on windwows http://www.codeaffine.com/2015/11/04/clean-sheet-an-ergonomic-eclipse-theme-for-windows-10/
About scrollbars: we already have custom scrollbars in Dark Theme. See: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/attachment.cgi?id=263043 See also: Bug 430278 - [FEEP] [CSS] Add support for styling StyledText Scrollbars Bug 497310 - [Dark] improve dark theme adding themed scrollbars Bug 455526 - Ability to replace the native ScrollBar for Scrollable in SWT
