Visual Artifacts

This application note presents solutions for various user interface related issues.

The overall look of DVT Eclipse is the result of layering the OS theme, Eclipse theme and syntax highlighting theme of source code editors.

  • The OS theme can be set according to your OS instructions.

  • The Eclipse Theme can be set from Window > Preferences > General > Appearance > Theme

  • The Eclipse Colors and Fonts can be set from Window > Preferences > General > Color and Fonts

  • DVT syntax highlight options for supported languages can be found Syntax Coloring.

In a typical flow, changing the DVT Theme as described Themes will affect settings for each of the layers specified above. This includes syntax highlighting for many popular languages in addition to the languages supported by DVT, overwriting their particular settings.

Prior to searching for a particular issue below, please make sure you check the following:

  • If you choose to change the default DVT theme, make sure you do it from Window > Preferences > DVT > Themes and NOT from Window > Preferences > General > Appearance > Theme

  • The theming engine is enabled under Window > Preferences > General > Appearance > Enable theming

  • If using Linux, the Eclipse theme is set to classic under Window > Preferences > General > Appearance > Theme - this applies even if you want to have a dark theme

  • If using Linux, the GTK3 theme of the OS is “Adwaita”

The list of known problems and solutions follows.

The underscore character is not visible in editors

This is a known bug that affects specific GTK versions, see:

As a workaround:

  • increase the editor font size such that the underscore becomes visible

  • change the editor font to a different one, preferably monospaced - see instructions below

I want to adjust the font size

To change the editor font size, go to Window > Preferences > DVT > Themes.

To change the font size for the rest of the UI (trees, views, menu, etc) , follow the steps below depending on your OS and Eclipse version:

  • If using Windows, you have to perform the change at the OS level, typically in the theme customization window

  • If using Linux you have two options

    • perform the change globally, at the OS level, typically in the theme customization window

    • set the font size for any GTK application started under your user by adding in $HOME/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css (create the directory structure and file if they don’t exist) a setting like:

      * {
 font: Arial 15;
}

I adjusted the font size using “Tree and Table font for views” but it doesn’t work

This preference doesn’t work properly with the Classic theme. We enforce the “Classic” Eclipse theme by default for performance reasons. The recommended way to change the UI fonts is specified above.

The diagram fonts are not visible – rendered as empty rectangles ▯▯▯

Usually this happens when some system watchdog clears the contents of the /tmp directory. Diagram font descriptions are stored there when you start DVT. To fix this issue simply restart DVT.

The UI feels laggy / slow typing

If you are using a remote desktop application like VNC and the problem is specific to Eclipse (that is - it is not exhibited by other GUI-intensive applications such as Firefox for example) then you should try adding the following arguments to the dvt.sh / dvt_cli.sh command:

-options disable_cairo