Minimal theme for Eclipse

If I may, please let me make a plug to my blog entry on running Eclipse on the Eee PC 901, which has a 8.9 inch screen with a resolution of 1024 x 600.

I have some tips toward the end of the entry on ways to maximize the screen real estate in order to be able to show as much source code as possible on the screen.

The main points are:

• Vertical screen real estate is limited, so try to find ways to reduce the vertical spread of windows.
• Use the OS theme which reduces the amount of vertical space used. For example, use the Windows Classic theme in Windows XP in order to save 8 pixels over the default theme.
• Reduce the numbers of rows in the Eclipse toolbar.
• Use the auto-hide feature of the Windows taskbar to squeeze another 30 pixels in the vertical direction.

With the tips applied, Eclipse on a 1024 x 600 screen looks like the following:

(Link to full-size image)

You could try the somewhat more compact "Eclipse 2.1 Style Presentation" under General -> Appearance. In the same place, you can put "the Perspective switcher" on the left side.

But no theme can change the fact that a 10" screen simply is too small for a multi-view IDE like eclipse. Pretty much the only way to get around this is to use it more like a traditional editor, i.e. banish all views except the editor to the fastview bar and learn to use hotkeys as much as possible, e.g. Ctrl-O instead of a spearate outline view, F5, F6 and F7 instead of the icons in the debug view, etc.

If I maximize the editor (Ctrl-M) and use the Eclipse Full Screen Plugin I find Eclipse pretty usable on my 10" netbook.