Stefaan Lippens' webface

Indentation with spaces and the tab key in Eclipse. I've pulled quite some hair on this one and now that I found the solution, I decided to write it down, so I don't have to loose my precious hair anymore.

Everybody has its own preferences, but I like 2 space indentation for PHP (code style of Drupal) and 4 space indentation in Python. And when I press the tab key, I want to increase the indentation level, not insert a tab character. Doesn't seem like much to ask, but it took a long and frustrating process to get this working in Eclipse (3.5 aka Galileo at the time of this writing), Aptana Studio actually, with PDT for PHP development and the excellent Pydev for Python development.

Finally! I found how to get the keyboard shortcut for code completion working in Eclipse on Mac OS X. At work, on Linux, I use CTRL-SPACE all the time in Eclipse. Unfortunately that did not work on my MacBook: CMD-SPACE triggers the spotlight search widget and CTRL-SPACE is tied to the Quicksilver launcher in my case.

Today, I wanted to do some profiling of a Java application in Eclipse (3.4 aka Ganymede) on my Ubuntu 8.10 box at work. Google pointed me to the Eclipse TPTP (Test & Performance Tools) platform, which I installed through the Eclipse plug-in installer thingy, that weird acting constantly blocking/reloading user interface located under the "help" menu (of all places!), but lets not get us carried away by that for the moment.

After installation (and the obligatory eclipse restart), I tried to use the new tool, but soon my enthusiasm was curbed as I got a nice red error message IWAT0435E An error occurred when connecting to the host on the monitor tab of the profile configuration dialog. No profiling for me, sir. Bummer.

Getting ready for what started to smell like another jumping through hoops session, I googled the warning and got to this eclipse bug report. Apparently, some component of TPTP requires a prehistoric version of libstdc++. Unfortunately, that version was not available anymore in the standard Ubuntu repositories since Ubuntu 8.04 or something.