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[FIXED] Eclipse Issues with Clicking on Ubuntu/GNOME

For the last few months, have moved most of my work programming from the Mac to Ubuntu (first convenience via VMs, recently because I switched jobs and at the new employer it was that or Windows) which has mostly gone will, though there were some issues around Eclipse UI gotchas, notably:

  • Sometimes buttons wouldn’t let you click them (though keyboard focus mostly worked find)
  • Sometimes windows wouldn’t paint properly – contents, toolbars, etc.

At first I thought it might have been Virtualbox’s mouse driver, but it looks like it’s a generic Eclipse/GTK issue, with some notes at http://blogs.gurulabs.com/dax/2009/10/what-gdk-native.html on the root cause, and how to fix it. For the time being I’ve created scripts to launch Eclipse (and STS) and before I fire off Eclipse, do a:

1
export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1

This seems to resolve the painting issues, though it feels a bit less smooth/fast (UBUNTU+GNOME+COMPIZ) – still usable, though admittedly have tried this on a pretty fast machine (recent 2xQuad-Core w/lots of RAM)