Development Cycle

The last couple of years I have been using Aptana Studio exclusively as my IDE of choice, after deciding it offered the power of Eclipse in a more user friendly format. I find the standard Aptana theme very easy on the eyes when coding for long amounts of time. Unfortunately though sometimes the colour scheme can make finding matching brackets a pain.

Luckily though a friend filled me on in the “Goto matching Bracket” feature. To find a matching bracket in Aptana Studio or Eclipse simply put your cursor on the line containing the bracket you would like to find the partner for and press CTRL + SHIFT + P. This will open up a little menu box with an option labelled “Goto matching Bracket”, selecting this will then magically transport your cursor to the line of its matching bracket.

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Since its release on April 28th Natty Narwhal (11.04) seems to have gained it fair share of haters. The Unity interface is a huge change to the UI and in most peoples experience its buggy and doesn’t seem ready for the prime time.

No issue I thought after I upgraded I will just use the “Ubuntu Classic” option at login until the new Unity interface matures, unfortunately whilst coding in Eclipse earlier today I noticed using the classic interface or not some issues are still there. I was looking at a wide piece of code in Eclipse and started to become alarmed, what the hell has happened to my editors scroll bars?

I didn’t really pick up on the missing vertical scroll straight away as the scroll wheel on the mouse still got me where I was headed without issue, but I was left without any easy way to browse to the far right if the code was wider than the display area.

I am told the scroll bars are supposed to appear when the mouse hovers in their vicintiy although this doesn’t seem to happen when using Eclipse at present. Luckily it seems pretty easy to fix, I just wrote a 3 line bash file that gives me back the classic scroll bars I have come to love.

Simply saved the file made it executable with:

Updated my menu and desktop shortcuts to point to my script rather than directly to the Eclipse executable, restarted the application and thankfully problem solved!