Very large tabs in Eclipse panes on Ubuntu

You can edit Eclipse's CSS instead of messing with the GTK theme.

In your Eclipse directory find the file plugins/org.eclipse.platform_4.2.*/css/e4_default_gtk.css (there's an * in there, because I guess that the version may change in the future or may be different already). In this file there's a CSS class:

.MPartStack {
    font-size: 11;
    swt-simple: false;
    swt-mru-visible: false;
}

And you have two possible solutions:

1. change font-size to something smaller
2. just comment out or remove font-size from this class (works well for me)

And that should do the trick.

Style of tabs can be changed in Eclipse 4.2 by editing CSS. You can change styles directly in Eclipse Preferences window after installing the E4 CSS editor plug-in.

Go to menu Help > Install new software, then install E4 CSS editor (Incubation) plug-in using Eclipse 4 update site (add this link: http://download.eclipse.org/e4/updates/0.12).

After restart, go to Window > Preferences, General > Appearance and now you can edit styles here for any selected theme.

I am using this style for tabs:

.MPartStack {
  font-size: 9;
  font-family: Liberation Sans;
  swt-tab-renderer: null;
  swt-tab-height: 22px;
  swt-selected-tabs-background: #FFFFFF #ECE9D8 100%;
  swt-simple: false;
  swt-mru-visible: false;
}

You can specify tabs height using the swt-tab-height option. It's value sets tab height ignoring the font size.

I also wanted to reduce especially the horizontal space in order to fit more tabs, as Eclipse lacks multi-row tabs.

These instructions will go for any platform (not limited to e.g. Ubuntu/GTK).

What I did was:

• Reduced the font size
• Changed font to something horizontal-compact
• Removed the X (close tab) button

...yielding the following result on my system (Win 7):

...and this is how it's done:

1. Check what CSS layout you're using: Preferences->General->Appearance-> check value of 'Theme:' listbox

2. Open the corresponding file in <eclipse folder>\plugins\org.eclipse.platform_<your version>\css, e.g. e4_default_win7.css

3. Modify .MPartStack entries to set font size and font, e.g.:

   .MPartStack {
       font-size: 8;
       font-family: 'Arial Narrow';
       swt-simple: true;
       swt-mru-visible: false;
   }
   

4. Add the following entry to remove the X (close icon):

   CTabItem {
       swt-show-close: false !important;   
   }
   

That's it!