Make Eclipse Less Ugly in Linux Mint 13 with MATE

 

Eclipse Juno looks terrible in Linux Mint 13 with the MATE desktop environment. Here’s an example of part of the screen:

Everything is big and bulky, the tool bar’s style doesn’t really match the theme’s style.

Here are the steps I’ve taken so far to correct this:

• Create a file called gtkrc, I’ve created one in my ~/eclipse directory:

  gtk-color-scheme = "selected_text_color:#000000"
  style "compact"
  {
    GtkButton::default_border={0,0,0,0}
    GtkButton::default_outside_border={0,0,0,0}
    GtkButtonBox::child_min_width=0
    GtkButtonBox::child_min_heigth=0
    GtkButtonBox::child_internal_pad_x=0
    GtkButtonBox::child_internal_pad_y=0
    GtkMenu::vertical-padding=1
    GtkMenuBar::internal_padding=1
    GtkMenuItem::horizontal_padding=4
    GtkToolbar::internal-padding=1
    GtkToolbar::space-size=1
    GtkOptionMenu::indicator_size=0
    GtkOptionMenu::indicator_spacing=0
    GtkPaned::handle_size=4
    GtkRange::trough_border=0
    GtkRange::stepper_spacing=0
    GtkScale::value_spacing=0
    GtkScrolledWindow::scrollbar_spacing=0
    GtkExpander::expander_size=10
    GtkExpander::expander_spacing=0
    GtkTreeView::vertical-separator=0
    GtkTreeView::horizontal-separator=0
    GtkTreeView::expander-size=12
    GtkTreeView::fixed-height-mode=TRUE 
    GtkWidget::focus_padding=0 
  
    font_name="Liberation Sans,Sans Regular 8"
    text[SELECTED] = @selected_text_color
  }
  class "GtkWidget" style "compact"
  style "compact2"
  {
    xthickness=1
    ythickness=1
  }
  class "GtkButton" style "compact2"
  class "GtkToolbar" style "compact2"
  class "GtkPaned" style "compact2"

• Next, in Eclipse, go to Window -> Preferences -> General -> Appearance, and under Theme, make sure GTK is selected.
• Run eclipse like this:

  GTK2_RC_FILES=$GTK2_RC_FILES:~/eclipse/gtkrc ~/eclipse/eclipse

This ought to improve it a bit:

More to come as I figure out how to further improve this.

References:

http://xmemory.tompium.com/2012/01/make-eclipse-look-better-on-ubuntu.html