Category Archives: Eclipse für PHP

Beiträge zum Einsatz von Eclipse in der PHP-Web-Entwicklung

Eclipse – too small icons on high dpi screens – workaround for KDE Plasma by scaling on X11 and Wayland

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I have to work with Eclipse (version 4.32) again for a while. After two days of relatively intensive work, I am a bit frustrated. One reason is the small size of the icons – 16×16 px. Not only in the main icon taskbar. There are minuscule symbols elsewhere – e.g. in the bar on the left side of the editor section. Regarding e.g. the tiny symbol for code folding: You can almost not see the “+” or “-” symbols on a high resolution screen …

One can scale almost all font-sizes within Eclipse – but not such a basic thing as the icon/symbol size or the icon bar height.

I have three QHD screens (2560×1440) at my present workplace. At another site there are 2 4K screens. The following image can give you an impression for the QHD situation – if you have a QHD, UHD or 4K screen yourself and not zoomed the browser contents already. For screens with lower resolution see below.

Before you say this looks quite OK, check the following:

  • Open this post on a desktop screen in a window wider than 800 px.
  • Enforce normal content size size in your browser (no zoom! Ctrl-0).
  • Get a natural distance to your working QHD, UHD or 4K monitor (like 80+ cm). In case you have a QHD screen you get already the right impression.
  • Users who just have a monitor with a 1920×1200 resolution must in addition downscale their browser contents to around 80% (QHD) or 55% (UHD, 4K) to get the right impression of the problem. (After Ctrl-0)
  • Folks with QHD get the right 4K impression by scaling down to 66%. (After Ctrl-0)

While for QHD the working conditions may still appear to be OK, you get a real problem for UHD and 4K resolutions. The font-size may still be OK (after having adapted it). The unadaptable symbol sizes, however, are far too small. At least in my opinion. But even on my standard QHD screens I personally do not feel comfortable after a while.

In this post I want to share some workarounds. The methods described may be interesting for other GTK applications, too. Keep in mind that the images in this post may give you a wrong impression if you zoomed the browser contents. But later on, when I demonstrate the effect of some measures, only relative sizes of fonts and icons are of interest.

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Eclipse IDE – how to limit the number of of CPU cores used on a Linux PC

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In the very hot days which we experienced in Germany the last week my old ventilation cooled PC suffers a bit when all of my CPU cores get under full load. Temperatures up to 70&grad; Celsius despite an Alpenföhn ventilator are beyond my normal experience and tolerance. The culprit was Eclipse with PyDev.

I had installed the latest Eclipse version (4.32.0) some days before. And opened a new Python project based on a directory with tons of code for Machine Learning classes. As a default the PyDev validator started to check the code for problems. It does so by using all available CPU cores and threads in parallel. Yeah, Eclipse works highly parallelized with its underlying Java VM. As I had a lot of complex code the code analysis lasted for some minutes – putting an extreme load on my PC.

So, my question was: How can one limit the number of CPU cores/threads used by Eclipse?

For Linux the answer is surprisingly simple:

We can use the “taskset” command. E.g., if I wanted to use the first 4 CPU cores (or recognized threads) we would write on the command line: 

taskset -c 0-3 ./eclipse &

This works perfectly! The initial code analysis takes a bit longer – but the load on the PC got down. Happy coding!

 

Eclipse Photon 2018-09 für PHP – endlich gute Content Assist Performance

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Ende August war ich auf die “R”-Version von Eclipse Photon umgestiegen. Der Start der IDE erwies sich zwar als elend langsam; aber immerhin erschien mir das Zusammenspiel mit GTK3 gegenüber Eclipse Oxygen deutlich verbessert. Auch eine Java10-Runtime-Umgebung ließ sich gut verwenden.

Etwas hat mich jedoch zunehmend bei der Arbeit behindert:
Bei großen PHP-Projekten erwies sich die Content-Assist-Funktion [CA] des PHP Editors als bodenlos langsam. Wenn man den Heap beobachtete, so wechselte der während des Wartens auf eine CA-Antwort ständig die Größe. Gegenüber den in Eclipse ablaufenden Hintergrundsprozessen (Neu-Indizierung vieler Files? Update diverser Oberflächenelemente? …) kam die CA-Funktionalität offenbar erst mit geringer Priorität zum Tragen. Das war völlig irregulär. Mal erhielt man eine Anwtort zu einer lokalen Variable sofort; mal musste man 5- 6 Sekunden warten. Die Meldung “Computing proposals ….” ging mir zunehmend auf den Zeiger. Wer will beim Tippen schon 5 Sek warten, bis der erste Vorschlag kommt? Leider hat keine der angebotenen Optionen unter “Preferences >> PHP >> Editor >> Content Assist” viel geholfen. Auch nicht zur “asynchron Code Completion”. Ich war kurz davor, wieder auf Oxygen zurück zu gehen.

Heute habe ich heute aber die neue “September-Version von Eclipse ( “eclipse-php-2018-09-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz” ) installiert, Updates der “webkit2”-Bibliotheken unter Opensuse vorgenommen und auch die “~/.eclipse”-Eintragungen neu erstellen lassen.

Und siehe da: Die Performance der CA-Funktionalität im PHP-Editor ist nun wieder so wie in alten Zeiten. nach nun 6 Stunden Arbeit kann ich sagen: Das Programmieren mit PHP und Eclipse macht wieder Freude ….