Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Windows 7, Eclipse, Mintty

I recently switched to Windows 7 at work and so had to reinstall and rethink a couple of things and learned a few new things along the way.

While I was looking for a way to pin a cygwin shell to the taskbar, I found someone mentioning mintty. If only I had known about it earlier. Finally I can have a shell in windows that does copy/paste right. It defaults to paste on middle-click and you can configure it to copy-on-select so you get a nice linuxish behaviour.

And reinstalling eclipse I ran into quite an annoying issue that I wish would have been easier to figure out. If you unpack things into windows' program folder, Windows 7 sets permissions so that you need admin privileges to change anything. This is probably a pretty good idea, I just wasn't aware of it at all.

So now when I tried to install plugins in eclipse, it couldn't put them into its installed directory but instead created a .eclipse folder in my home directory and put stuff there. And apparently a lot of plugins can't really cope with that and just silently fail.

So, if you ever wondered why, even though it says that subclipse is installed, you don't have SVN as a choice of Team Provider, that's why.

And that was some very random and lucky googling that saved me from wasting a few more hours on that problem.