Debug eclipse IDE itself

Question

I would love to learn how to debug eclipse IDE. Back to the time when I was using VS for .NET development, I can attach VS to a process at anytime and start to trace down th

Answer 1

Back to the time when I was using VS for .NET development, I can attach VS to a process at anytime and start to trace down the problem.

Remote debugging is also possible in Java with the Java Platform Debugger Architecture (JPDA), you just need to start the application you want to debug with remote debugging enabled. Here is an article showing how to do this and how to configure Eclipse to debug a remove application.

Note that starting from Java 5, you should prefer the -agentlib:jdwp option over the -Xdebug and -Xrunjdwp options as explained in Sun VM Invocation Options.

Update: Eclipse is a Java application so it should be possible to add the options mentioned in the article in eclipse.ini. Never tried that though (I missed the fact that you want to debug Eclipse itself).