Gigantic tabs in Eclipse on Ubuntu

Question

EDIT: For those who approach this issue through search, you can install a Gnome theme called Clearlooks Compact to shorten your tabs in Eclipse. It will free up space screen. You can also check the answer below to learn how to make tabs more horizontally compact.

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Short version: how to make a short version of Eclipse tabs and toolbars in Ubuntu?

I was looking for a solution about this on Google, but to no avail. With any GTK theme, I still have the same problem, and it's very, very annoying - to the point that I stopped using Eclipse in favor of gEdit. However, after starting pylint from the terminal too. many. time. I decided that I needed to find a solution to these problems with Eclipse in order to return PyDev. Here are the tabs:

alt text http://c0496682.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/big-tabs.png

As you can see, not only the tabs are exaggerated, but also the toolbar: the same as the toolbar below; as well as the tabs in the bottom panel. In general, it eats up a lot of space on the screen, which is a hard element that can appear on a 17-inch screen. Any suggestions / corrections?

Answer 1

I also got a little better before finding a solution by changing the general appearance of my development environment.

You can try and customize the look or environment of Eclipse,

Go to: Window → Settings → General → Appearance.

try installing

• Current presentation for "Default."
• Enable "traditional style tabs" (for rectangular tabs).
• Turn off animation (if you don't like the swoosh effect.)

Answer 2

This can be solved by changing the GTK settings;

gedit ~/.gtkrc-2.0 

Then add this;

 style "gtkcompact" { 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=0 GtkMenuItem::horizontal_padding=4 GtkToolbar::internal-padding=0 GtkToolbar::space-size=0 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 GtkTreeView::vertical-separator=0 GtkTreeView::horizontal-separator=0 GtkTreeView::fixed-height-mode=TRUE GtkWidget::focus_padding=0 } class "GtkWidget" style "gtkcompact" 

borrowed from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1465712

Answer 3

In addition to @Varun Mehta's answer, I recommend the following tips for Eclipse 4 (Juno), whose interface is partially dictated and configured by CSS rules:

In YourEclipseDir/plugins/org.eclipse.platform_4.xyv2012zzzzzzzz/css , edit:

• e4_basestyle.css
• e4_default.css
• e4_default_gtk.css

... and configure these files. I use the following set of settings:

• set all margin-* and padding to 0
• set swt-shadow-visible: false wherever you find it to get rid of these huge shadows
• set .MPartStack {font-size} to something less than 12

Finally, remember that you can disable the toolbar. In 4.0, its state was not remembered in different sessions, but it seems that the problem is solved in 4.2.1.

Bonus Resources: Eclipse4 / CSS helps you get started with Eclipse4 CSS, E4 / CSS / SWT Mapping contains other interesting CSS attributes, and CSS Spy helps you get familiar with the user interface.

Screenshot of what I get:

EDIT: see also How to remove the close (×) button on Eclipse Juno tabs?

Answer 4

In addition to Ronans answers, you can change the height of the tabs directly in Eclipse Juno.

edit the css file of your current style (e.g. e4_default_gtk.css) and add

 CTabFolder { tab-height: 16px; } 

Note: CTabFolder ... do not add this to CTabFolder Canvas!

Answer 5

Note. By default, Eclipse 4 only improved slightly with error 420238 closed:

[CSS] Reduce the use of spaces in Eclipse default fields

Before:

After:

See the Lars Vogel article on this:

If you run the next build of Eclipse 4.4, Eclipse uses far fewer spaces and leaves more room for important content.

(It will be 4.4 M5)

While this is technically a trivial change, I hope this improves people's initial perceptions when using Eclipse.

Many thanks to Daniel Rolka, Robin Stocker and Dani Megert for most of the work and many thanks to all the parties involved in the Bug report for accepting this change.

Answer 6

If you really want to make the tabs nice “short,” take gander in Clearlooks Compact .

I preferred to simply hit the entire IDE with a burst of "meh", so here is where I ended up.