ABAP in Eclipse 2.80 benefits Eclipse Oxygen

On June 28nd Eclipse Foundation released the Oxygen release which is the newest version of the Eclipse platform. This release brings some nice improvements the ABAP Development Tools directly benefit from:

Improvements of the “Quick Access” field

• You can now use * and ? as wildcards and also search for partial descriptions in Quick Access (Ctrl+3).
• You can now Search in Help after you’ve entered text in the Quick Access dialog.
• The Quick Access (Ctrl+3) result list does not show duplicate elements anymore. Now, if a search result element is already in the “Previous Choices” category, it is no longer shown in another category.
• Quick Access (Ctrl+3) now shows the icon for a Command if available.

Improvements in other views

• In the “Problems” view you can copy the description of an error into the clipboard using commands in the “Copy Details” context menu.

• You can now see the description for a perspective (if provided by the contributing plug-in) by pressing F2 in the Open Perspective dialog.

Usability Improvements in various dialogs

A lot of the dialogs provided by the platform now use verbs instead of OK/No/Yes, which makes the dialogs more direct and specific. One example is the “Exit” dialog which now uses “Exit” instead of “OK”

High resolution images

More images were replaced with high resolution images. With this the ugly white borders around shapes especially visible in the dark theme are now gone for these icons. To see their full beauty, a high-DPI monitor (e.g. a Retina Mac) is needed.

Themes and Styling

• The default styling for form-based user interfaces was changed to use a more modern flat, gray style.
• The styling of the window toolbar has been improved. On Windows, the toolbar color is now consistent with the color of the perspective switcher.
• The Eclipse default dark theme includes various fixes to the styling. Most importantly: table and tree headers in table and tree controls as well as the “Progress” view now correctly have a dark background color.

These features are generically provided by the platform and all ABAP in Eclipse editors and views directly benefit from it.

More details about these features and also other new features can be found on Eclipse’s “New and Noteworthy” page.

Version 2.80 of the ABAP Development Tools is the first version officially released for the usage on top of Eclipse Oxygen. This version also brings the first basic support for Eclipse’s popular “Dark Theme”.