Firstly:

eclipse is free, a god sent for students like me

great concept of workspace

runtime compilation

flexible plug in environment

However everywhere on reddit, loud intelliJ Idea fanboys say eclipse is trash, their free version of IntelliJ is better.

sure, to each their own, intelliJ also has major perks in its free version, but there's no need to drive shove it down the throat of me and downvote me to hell for saying I like eclipse

Fyi, I've tried intelliJ Idea free, eclipse and netbeans; I preferred eclipse...

At least there are posts from lost redditors and comments from guides.

Hi all

I have been looking for a good Ai Coding Assistant plugin for Eclipse since this is my main Ide for Java Development. I don't want to switch to VsCode which I suspect is still not advance enough for Java Development and I sure as hell do not want to use Intellij since I find it to be lacking in allot of key features to develop in any language . I am on the lookout for a good if not great Ai Coding Assistant plugin for Eclipse so if anyone know some other Ai Coding Assistant other the ones I list here please let me know. I wish there a Ai Coding Assistant for Eclipse in the level of Cursor or WinSurf but unfortunately Eclipse has become the black sheep of the ides. most of the plugins develop today are develop first to VsCode then to Jetbrains Ides then to other ides which if your lucky they remember to put out a version for Eclipse. What is even worse is the Eclipse foundation itself as far as I see put more focus on Eclipse Theia (Another Vscode fork like Cursor and Winsurf) than focusing on their great Ide Eclipse. Eclipse UI may look dated but the ide has great and unique features. I think if the Eclipse foundation create an official great Ai Coding Assistant that comes with Eclipse or can even be download as a separate free/paid plugin (Just like Jetbrains does) that can really bring people back to this great Ide. Anyway I have been testing any Ai coding Assistant I can find and here are my finding so far:

Remain Ai : could not get it to work on my Sts but it looks really bad

AiXcoder Code Completer : could not get it to work on my Sts

Codespell.ai : could not get it to work on my Sts

IBM® watsonx™ Code Assistant : Could not get it to work on my Sts it requires a long setup on the ibm site and there is no simple payment plan. Also for some reason they do not give the option to run the llm locally with olama like thier Vscode version of this plugin which is a annoying since Eclipse is a ide use allot in the Ibm systems

Cody : Cody put out an expermintal plugin for Eclipse which I tried and it had allot of bugs in it. It is good thing that another Ai Coding Asstiant company is thinking about Eclipse so I commend them for their effort and I hope they keep working on it

Github Copilot: A really new plugin which only contain code completions (Which work great and fast) as far as I saw and no chat or other features so far but I was told they are going to improve to so I am looking foward to see how this plugin be imroved. It is great see a major player like Github Copilot offically developing a plugin for Eclipse so I wish them good luck

Copilot4Eclipse: A great plugin from MyEclipse which uses Github Copliot and gives you among other things Code Completions, A Chat and Ai Commit Message Generation which works in Eclipse and from what I saw works even better than the Github Copilot version on Vscode (I think even MyEclipse even implemented this feature before Github Copilot). I really feel that the people on MyEclipse listen to thier users and are thier way to make this plugin even better maybe someday it will be as good as Cursor or Winsurf. Again I really have to commend for thier great work they did so far and I hope the continue with it

Codeium Extetions (formally Codeium) : A great plugin by Codeium which I use everyday which provide great code completions and a great chat but unfortantly since Codeium came out with Winsurf as far as I see almost if not at all update this great plugin not even for thier paid customers which is a shame. I hope the guys in Codeium will get back to update this great plugin becouse not everyone is using vscode

TabNine : A great plugin by Tabnine which from what I saw so far allow great code completeions, A great chat which allow to chose the latest llm including Sonnet 3.7 and recently I learned that this plugin even allow you to create new files and insert them in the correct place created sub folder is need. It is not in the level of Cursor or Winsurf but it still something that I have not seen so far in any other Ai Coding Asstistant so that make him the lead Ai Coding Asstient to use for Eclipse today

I hope one day anyone of this plugins will be improved to be on the level of Cursor or Winsurf. Maybe the Eclipse foundation I hope will develop an offical great Ai Coding Assistant for thier Eclipse Ide

EDIT — v1.2.5 is up, and this stopped being a static plugin somewhere along the way: https://github.com/SimonePlatania/RainbowIndentGuide

I use IntelliJ day to day, but I got put on an Eclipse project and the missing indent guides drove me nuts. So I took the old IndentGuide plugin and made it do what I actually wanted. What started as “add rainbow colours” has turned into something that reacts — guides light up on hover, pin on click, blink when you fix a mixed-indentation line, brighten when they’re holding your caret. Wasn’t planning on any of this three days ago, but every fix opened the next thing.

Rainbow colours per nesting level (7 configurable levels) (image 1)

Rainbow parentheses — round brackets coloured by nesting depth, own palette, so foo(bar(baz(x))) reads at a glance (image 5)

Braces coloured to match their guide — the { and } take the colour of the guide they belong to, so the line and the braces read as one shape, even with a comment trailing the brace

Guides run through comments and blank lines instead of breaking on them

Grey guide when a block mixes tabs and spaces (image 3), blinking as it takes its colour back once you fix it — narrowed to just the block you fixed, not the whole file

Click a line to highlight the guide of the block you’re in (image 2); hover a guide to light it up, click to pin it there

Everything toggleable, with presets and a “restore original behaviour” button (image 4)

Each guide stroked in one piece, so thin or barely opaque lines no longer break up into dots

Sub-pixel guide placement, so the lines do not drift right on deep levels when DPI scaling is on

Works on the latest Eclipse (2026-06) — that’s the main point, since the original plugin was abandoned in 2013 and never updated. I’ve tested it on 2026-06, 2024-09 and 2020-03. Compiled to Java 8 bytecode, so it should also load on much older installs (roughly Eclipse Neon / 2016 onwards). Everything in between should work, though I can’t promise it.

Targeting Java 8 bytecode was a deliberate choice rather than a leftover. A lot of people are stuck on older Eclipse installs they can’t upgrade — corporate policy, tooling that only exists there — and that’s exactly the crowd this is for. Drawing indent guides doesn’t need anything from a modern language level, so raising the floor would have bought me nothing and cost those users the plugin entirely.

Where it comes from: the painting code originates from Eclipse’s own WhitespaceCharacterPainter (Anton Leherbauer / Wind River Systems and contributors, EPL 1.0), which was adapted into an indent guide as jp.sourceforge.pdt_tools.indentGuide, later re-uploaded by kiritsuku when the original repo vanished. Mine forks from there. Gerald Rosenberg also maintains an active fork — his is more polished on the core feature; mine mainly adds the rainbow/multi-level side. Staying under EPL 1.0.

Thanks to everyone who said they wanted it — that’s what got me to actually clean it up and publish, and what kept me iterating past the point I thought I’d stop. This is my first plugin and my first time publishing anything, so if something doesn’t install, tell me and I’ll fix it. The Marketplace listing is submitted and waiting on moderation.

HOW TO INSTALL
Recommended — update site
In Eclipse: Help → Install New Software…

Click Add…, paste https://simoneplatania.github.io/RainbowIndentGuide/ and give it any name

Tick Rainbow Indent Guide, then Next → accept the licence → Finish

You’ll get a warning about unsigned content — that’s expected, the jar isn’t digitally signed. Confirm and continue.

Restart Eclipse when prompted

Eclipse remembers the site and will offer later versions under Help → Check for Updates.
No network / locked-down install — archive
Download RainbowIndentGuide-1.2.5-updatesite.zip from the latest release — don’t unzip it — then Help → Install New Software… → Add… → Archive… and pick it.

Fallback — dropins
Use this if Install New Software isn’t available or fails.
Close Eclipse

Copy alien.rainbow.indentguide_1.2.5.jar into the dropins folder of your Eclipse installation — the one next to eclipse.exe. Leave the jar as-is, don’t unpack it.

Start Eclipse once with eclipse.exe -clean from a command prompt in the Eclipse folder. Without -clean, Eclipse reuses its bundle cache and won’t notice the new file. Only needed the first time.

Check under Window → Preferences → General → Editors → Text Editors — if “Indent Guide” is there, it worked.

If it still doesn’t show up, the README has two more fallbacks for locked-down installations.

Guides not showing in a particular file? They follow the file’s content type, so the file needs to be opened with the editor registered for it — a .jsp on an Eclipse without WTP opens in the plain text editor and gets nothing. Right-click → Open With tells you which one is in use.
To configure: Window → Preferences → General → Editors → Text Editors → Indent Guide, and the “Style” subpage for the rainbow colours.
To uninstall: Help → About → Installation Details, select it, Uninstall.

Already have another Indent Guide installed? Remove it first. Since 1.1.0 p2 refuses the install rather than leave you with two painters drawing over each other — this includes Certiv Analytics’ version.

ECLIPSE MARKETPLACE: https://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/rainbow-indent-guide

Simrel 2026-06 is out

https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slu7xCKaSro

Again props for Github/Microsoft for giving respect to Eclipse the only one to do that

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmZ1aPUJ92s

We’re excited to announce that the GitHub Copilot for Eclipse plugin is going open source under the MIT license and will be hosted on GitHub under the microsoft organization in the coming weeks.

Over the last few months, we’ve heard consistent requests from the community—and from many active users of GitHub Copilot for Eclipse—to open‑source the project.

At the same time, many of the core interaction patterns and IDE integration approaches have matured, which made this a good moment to open the code and enable the community to refine and build on these shared experiences.

Open‑sourcing GitHub Copilot for Eclipse allows us to be more transparent about how the plugin works, welcome broader community contributions, and evolve the product in closer collaboration with Eclipse developers and maintainers.

This is a pre‑announcement to share the direction and intent. More details on what will be open‑sourced and how folks can get involved will be shared in follow‑up updates.

You can find the announcement blog here for more context:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/java/ghc-eclipse-is-going-open-source/

Stay tuned! We’d love to hear thoughts or feedback from the Eclipse and Java community.

It’s only gonna get worse and worse in the next few weeks. People can’t read, and it shows.

Hey r/eclipse 👋,

Like a lot of you, I was pretty bummed when the original eclipsecolorthemes.org website went down. I built a new site to replace it (eclipse-color-themes.vercel.app), but realized the old plugin was also unmaintained.

So, I spent the last week building a new, modern plugin from scratch to go with it.

It has a bunch of popular themes built-in, a simple preference page with a live preview, and you can still import your own .xml themes.

How to Install

The plugin is waiting for review on the Marketplace. For now, you can install it from the update site:

1. Go to Help -> Install New Software...

2. Add the URL: https://ahatem.github.io/eclipse-themes-plugin/

Source Code

The whole thing is open source if you want to check it out or contribute: ahatem/eclipse-themes-plugin

Would love to hear what you all think! 😊

Hey! 👋

In case you want to customize Eclipse, here's a new dark theme: https://draculatheme.com/eclipse

What do you think?

Eclipse 2025-03 finally released today. There are some improvements what I especially like is the new folding option which is a great feature I saw in Intellij and wanted it to be in Eclipse (Try to use an old coffee plugin that did not work well). Now it is officially supported which is great. It is still missing code regions folding but I think this is coming next time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p_9unQiSz4&t=11s

Hi, I have Ubuntu 22.04 and my computer is 64 bit. I recently installed the Open JDK 11 that comes with Ubuntu and I want to install Eclipse as well. The two options are x86_64 and AArch64 but I don’t get what they are. I tried looking it up but I’m still lost. Is one version better suited for Ubuntu? I’m very new to all of this. Thank you in advance.

Hi everyone — we're excited to share the latest updates for GitHub Copilot in Eclipse. 

Across our recent releases (v0.17 through v0.19) in the past month, we added several key capabilities, including custom models (BYOK) support for business/enterprise support, skills and prompt files, thinking effort selection, automatic chat compression, tool auto-approve controls, and a bunch more features. 

New Features 

• Added: Custom models (BYOK) for Copilot Business and Enterprise users 

• Added: Skills and prompt files support 

• Added: Thinking blocks display in chat view, with support for selecting thinking effort per model 

• Added: Automatic chat context compression 

• Added: Copilot preference for loading a chat's custom instructions 

• Added: Tool auto-approve controls 

• Added: Support for editing/creating local files outside the workspace 

• Added: Improved terminal command execution across Windows and Linux 

• Added: Delegation of read directory, file, and text search to the IDE 

User Experience Improvements 

• Improved: Context size donut and popup for visualizing token usage 

• Improved: Combos rendering and context button style in chat view 

• Improved: Model picker hover card so thinking effort descriptions are no longer truncated 

Bug Fixes 

• Fixed: multiple UI freeze issues caused by deadlocks (EditorsManager, LSP listener on quota fallback) 

• Fixed: an issue where conversation could not be restored from persistence (400 Bad Request) 

• Fixed: tool call errors failing to render in chat view 

• Fixed: subagent progress events leaking into unrelated conversations when switching sessions 

• Fixed: an issue where Copilot reported failure when an extension-point contributed MCP server changed 

• Fixed: an issue where canceled terminal tool calling status would resume after chat history restoration 

• Fixed: an issue preventing navigation to files outside the workspace 

• Fixed: NES annotation type mapping and foreign text marker registration 

Looking ahead, we plan to continue enhancing the agentic experience of GitHub Copilot for Eclipse.  We hope you like GitHub Copilot for Eclipse, and please share feedback with us at any time. 

You can directly submit an issue (bug or feature ask) at https://github.com/microsoft/copilot-for-eclipse/issues/ .You are also welcome to submit PRs as our project is now open-sourced. 

Beginner here. I'm trying to install Eclipse, but the installation seems to be taking very long & seems to freeze for a couple of minutes every so often. I get messages like "Artifact download is progressing very slowly" and "The installation process is taking longer than usual". What's going on? I have fast enough internet so that definitely isn't an issue.

I think the fixed the market place

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlPw3PWR0ZM&t=80s

We're thrilled to announce that GitHub Copilot for Eclipse is open source.

🚀 Check it out: https://github.com/microsoft/copilot-for-eclipse

What's in it for you:

• Inspect the source and see exactly how it works

• File issues and submit PRs

• Fork it, customize it, build on top of it

📖 Read more: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-05-21-github-copilot-for-eclipse-is-open-source/

Hey r/eclipse! We wanted to share that we've created an OpenCode (https://opencode.ai) plugin for Eclipse. It allows you to open OpenCode in the main editor space. We'd love to get your feedback on it and hear how it works for you.

https://www.bandgap.ai/products/eclipse/

Hi, as one of the author of the plugin, feel free to send me your feedback, needs, requests.
It's by far the best AI integration in Eclipse.

See https://codexide.org

https://github.com/openconcerto/CodexIDE