Custom splash screen for Eclipse plugin (Non-RCP)

Question

I want to brand a plugin I developed for Eclipse. I am starting with a custom splash screen. What I want is to display a custom image when Eclipse starts-up, once my plugin is installed. Note that my plugin in non-rcp.

All the methods that I've found till now (Adding the org.eclipse.ui.splashHandlers extensions, and implementing a class that extends EclipseSplashHandler), I tried them already, but to no avail. No custom splash-screen shows-up on startup. I guess that these methods are specific to only Eclipse RCP applications.

Is there any way I can have my own custom image displayed when Eclipse starts-up? This will be only when the user installs my plugin.

Answer 1

The splash image location is specified in the RCP config.ini file, you can't really change the contents of that from plugin. So this isn't possible. In any case a plugin should not be trying to change a product's splash screen.

You can add to the images in the About dialog using feature based branding.

Answer 2

When by chance I saw the question I had a gut feeling this is feasable.

To deal with splash, one has to use Eclipse P2 (Povisioning platform) – this is the only way to achieve that. The second point is to substitute splash after the first Eclipse restart – for that P2 touchpoint is the only solution. In Eclipse splash can be set in two places:

1. in configuraiton/config.ini file, as osgi.splashPath
2. in eclipse.ini file, as -showsplash parameter

There were 2 tasks - to create that "touchpoint" and to install it before our feature itself is installed. I created a simple plug-in, proof of concept, that implements this functionality - it substitutes original Eclipse splash after installation and changes splash to photos of the day from Bing.com - meet Bing splash plug-in!

Update site for Eclipse IDE - https://che4.github.io/