Getting a lightweight installation of Java Eclipse

Question

Having dealt with yet another stupid eclipse problem, I want to try to get the lightest, most minimal Eclipse installation as possible.

To be clear, I use eclipse for tw

Answer 1

Get as minimal an installation as you can, and then remove whatever is left that you don't want.

Longer answer:

I played around a bit. Here's how I experimented:

1. Extract a clean eclipse*.zip to two different directories; call it eclipse and eclipse-bak. We'll only modify eclipse.
2. Before starting it the first time, remove some of the features from the features folder. I got rid of org.eclipse.cvs, org.eclipse.epp.\*, ...mylyn\*, ...wst\*.
3. Start up Eclipse to a workspace. Create in that workspace a Java project, debugging configuration, etc. Stuff that you would want to do and that will complain if we remove the wrong thing. Open up the Error Log view.
4. Close Eclipse. Remove something (or a group of things) from the plugins folder.
5. Open Eclipse. Check the error log to see if something you care about couldn't load. If it did, add those things back from eclipse-bak/plugins. If not, close Eclipse and return to step 4 for a new set of plugins.

Using this I got my configuration to still be able to edit and debug Java files, but including only these plugins:

com.ibm.icu*
org.apache.*
org.eclipse.compare*
org.eclipse.core*
org.eclipse.debug*
org.eclipse.draw2d*
org.eclipse.ecf*
org.eclipse.epp.package.java*
org.eclipse.equinox*
org.eclipse.help*
org.eclipse.jdt*
org.eclipse.jface*
org.eclipse.ltk*
org.eclipse.osgi*
org.eclipse.platform*
org.eclipse.rcp*
org.eclipse.search*
org.eclipse.team.core
org.eclipse.team.ui
org.eclipse.text
org.eclipse.ui*
org.eclipse.update*
org.hamcrest*
org.sat4j*

Most of that is core stuff, but you might be able to trim it down further. Notably gone are Mylyn, the usage collector, EMF, CVS, WST, even JUnit (though I think you should keep JUnit).