Smooth Eclipse Context Menus

Question

I have several plugins (Apatana, SVN, Pydev, Zend Debugger, PHP) installed in my Eclipse 3.5.2 installation (Ubuntu 10.10). The only problem that has continued to listen to me since I first used Eclipse several years ago is that each plugin places new entries in context menus.

Unfortunately, it seems that different perspectives cannot determine which menu entries are useless. So when programming PHP the menu is full of java and pydev, I am really useless!

The more plugins installed, the dirtier the menu will get. It seems a little strange that such a rich IDE does not support context-sensitive "context" menus ...: - (

My hope is that somewhere on the Internet someone knows how to delete unused entries in the menu, or even created a small plugin for this.

Any ideas?

Screenshot: http://i.stack.imgur.com/D9HjN.png

Answer 1

Eclipse provides “features” as functionality for plugin developers to provide users with the ability to disable their plugin’s user interface features and tabs. I really do not know if this function will help in your case (that is: if the plugins that make entries in the menu that bother you have determined the necessary possibility to disable them).

If you go to Window > Preferences , then General > Capabilities , you can see several categories of "features" to enable or disable. I do not recommend disabling the categories themselves (for example, "development"), since you immediately disable all the Ant, Java, Python ... menus and the extension. Rather, use the "More ..." menu at the bottom of this page to see not only the categories, but also what they contain. There, in the "Development" section, you should be able to disable the extensions and the "java development" (JDT) menu "Ant Development" (remember that the "Run Ant Tool" button, which is visible in all perspectives next to "Run", to delete it). You should be able to turn off most of the clutter with this.

Please note that if the opportunities provided are not enough, you can create your own very easily, allowing you to disconnect even contributions from other plugins. The steps are simple for this:

• Use the menu item File > New > Other...
• Select the Plug-in Project and name the new project as you like, click Finish
• In the editor that opens, select the "Extensions" tab
• Click Add , disable "Show only add numbers from required plugins"
• find the extension point org.eclipse.ui.activities , select it and click Finish
• Right-click the org.eclipse.ui.activities element on the left and select New > Activity
• enter the id of your new action to the right of the page, for example my.disable.activity.id . Enter a name for reading below; for example, disable JDT.
• Right-click the org.eclipse.ui.activities element on the left and select New > activityPatternBinding .
• re-enter your activity identifier ( my.disable.activity.id ) in the "activityId" field, then enter the "template" of the contributions you want to disable. This is a regular expression. To disable all "JDT" (java development) contributions, enter org\.eclipse\.jdt\..*
• Right-click the org.eclipse.ui.activities element on the left and select New > categoryActivityBinding
• again enter your activity identifier ( my.disable.activity.id ) in the "activityId" field; then click Browse ... to the right of the categoryId field. Double-click the org.eclipse.categories.developmentCategory icon so that it appears in the settings menu to enable it.

Now, if you export this plugin (I will not describe the creation of the update site in detail, you should be able to adapt the explanation from Stefan Begaudo's blog ), all the menus from the JDT will be disabled (I tested this, so I know that it at least disables those that I checked (the "source" and "refactoring" menus by right-clicking on the Java file.) you indicated a category, you can re-enable these menu items on the features settings page that I hinted at at the beginning of this answer.

Answer 2

This is actually not a solution to your problem, but it is worth mentioning: Eclipse supports context-sensitive menus, but in such a way that the plug-in developer determines the contexts in which menu items should be displayed. Unfortunately, many developers do not care and say, "Make it visible everywhere." Then the decision should complain loudly about them.

Answer 3

Not a complete solution, but a more workaround. You can install clearlooks compact for Ubuntu. This greatly reduces component size, even in Eclipse.