Eclipse is formatting javadoc tooltips very poorly on Ubuntu

Question

I've been using Eclipse on Windows a lot, and recently started using it on Ubuntu for work.

My problem is, that the Javadoc tool til mostly is unformatted, E.g. <code> tags, links, etc. have no effect. Only line chages by b, br or ,pre tags plus bold seems to be rendered. (pre don't change font.). See the first example below.

Are there any tweaks I can do, to get something like the second image?

Extra: A fix to the colors, would be also be awesome, but not as important.

Thanks.

---

What I see now:

What I'll like to see

Soruce: http://codeblessyou.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/2011-07-01_115631.jpg

Answer 1

Got the same problem with the rendering of HTML inside the tooltips. After some fiddling around I got the solution:

Install libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 from the official Ubuntu repositories. It'S used by eclipse (and most likely other GTK applications) to render the HTML, but neither pre-installed on Kubuntu nor listed as a dependency in the eclipse packages.

Answer 2

It turns out this is caused by two problems:

1. Eclipse needs webkitgtk
2. Eclipse color scheme is messed up on ubuntu.

The solution is thus two-fold.

Part 1: Install webkitgtk

Just run this command in the terminal

sudo apt-get -y install libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 libwebkitgtk-3.0-0

Thanks to Johannes H. for this bit

Part 2: Update the color scheme

First create a new configuration in your home directory.

gedit ~/.gtkrc-eclipse

And paste this content:

# Customs color settings for Eclipse.
# Load Eclipse as follows:
# GTK2_RC_FILES=~/.gtkrc-eclipse eclipse
#
# Sources:
# http://stackoverflow.com/a/24043778/722929
# http://askubuntu.com/a/131348/18533
# http://weblog.avp-ptr.de/20120728/how-to-fix-eclipse-colors-for-autocompletion-and-tooltips/
 
# Tooltip background color.
style "eclipse-tooltips" {
bg[NORMAL] = "#f5f5b5"
fg[NORMAL] = "#000000"
}
 
# Load settings.
widget "gtk-tooltip*" style "eclipse-tooltips"

Find the eclipse43.desktop file and edit it (If you are using another version of Eclipse than 4.3 update the commands accordingly):

locate eclipse43.desktop
# Use the location from above
sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/eclipse43.desktop

Find the line that starts with Exec=... and change it from something like this:

Exec=/usr/bin/eclipse43

to something like this

Exec=/bin/bash -c "GTK2_RC_FILES=~/.gtkrc-eclipse /usr/bin/eclipse43"

Voila, beautiful colors. (or as beautiful as Eclipse gets)