I’ve been having problems with editing html and css files in Eclipse for quite some time now, even when I’m using the latest version of Eclipse, Galileo, and the latest version of PDT. Typing constantly lags, and just typing a short string sometimes takes around 12 seconds to appear. My machine is no wuss either, its a Macbook Pro with 4gb of ram, and I’ve allocated 2gb of that for eclipse alone. The problem stems from constant validation when typing even though the validators are suspended/disabled. To remedy this problem follow the following steps:

1. Go to Preference window
2. Expand the General tab
3. Expand the Editors tab
4. Click on the Structured Text Editor then disable the following:
   1. Report problems as you type
   2. Inform when unsupported content type is in editor
   3. Enable folding
   4. Enable semantic highlighting

That helped me alot in making Eclipse usable again for PHP development, now I can return to Eclipse from using Netbeans.

Update: Although Eclipse became usable with the tweaks above, I got spoiled with Netbeans’ speed especially the speed of code completion in PHP. Its nice being able to work with both PHP and Java without changing perspective. Now if only Netbeans’ would improve their Subversion support, that would be epic (well at least for me)!

Just upgraded my Macbook Pro (3,1) to Snow Leopard and the increase in speed and responsiveness of the system is immediately apparent. While everything seems to be working fine, two of my work-related softwares are broken. One is Macports, the fix is quite easy, just an upgrade to the new Macports version and its good to go. The other one is Eclipse Galileo.

Since i’m primarily a java developer I need an updated JDK, Snow Leopard comes with a 64-bit Java 1.6; there’s a rumor going around that there is a 32-bit version, but I can’t seem to find it in my system. So with a 32-bit Eclipse, the IDE can’t detect any JDK in the system. The solution is quite simple, just download the classic 64-bit Eclipse (its at the bottom of the Eclipse download page). While with this approach, you have to install the plugins yourself, but it beats having an old JDK to work with.