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

There are basically two ways of debugging a Java application (e.g. Eclipse). You can use JConsole, but it won't give you a lot of details. For attaching JConsole you have to enable remote debugging; this needs a JVM argument that you can write into the eclipse.ini file right next to the Eclipse executable.

Another option is to start a runtime workbench from Eclipse: this is used to test your own plug-ins, but as Eclipse plug-ins are the same, it is possible to start a debug session with an Eclipse application. To do this, you need at least one plug-in in your workspace (e.g. create a new hello world plugin project), and you can then debug this as an Eclipse application.