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The Hibernate 5.4 runtime provider now incorporates Hibernate Core version 5.4.21.Final and Hibernate Tools version 5.4.21.Final.

The Hibernate 5.3 runtime provider now incorporates Hibernate Core version 5.3.18.Final and Hibernate Tools version 5.3.18.Final.

The font used for tree and table views can now be customized with a font preference. This preference is called "Tree and Table font for views" and can be found in Window > Preferences > General > Appearance > Colors and Fonts under the "View and Editor Folders" category.

The Project Explorer is an example of a view that gets affected by this font preference.

Several years ago, the icons of the platform views were migrated to .png files. As already opened views store their reference to the image, the .gif files were left in the code. These have been removed now. If you are using the same workspace for multiple years and view icons are missing due to that removal, you have to close and reopen the view.

By default, Eclipse now closes if you select the close icon on the last window without additional confirmation dialog. If you want to get a confirmation dialog, you can enable that via Window > Preferences > General > Startup and Shutdown > Confirm exit when closing last window.

Workbench models (workbench.xmi) stored in workspaces created with releases before 2014 and never opened with a later release are not automatically converted anymore if opened with the 2020-09 release.

Previous Edit Location navigation (formerly named Last Edit Location) is now expanded to remember multiple edit locations.

The last 15 edit locations are now remembered. For convenience, similar edit locations in close proximity to each other are also merged so that each of the 15 remembered locations remains distinct.

How to use

Two new keyboard shortcuts are introduced:

New edit locations are always inserted at the end, so original historical ordering is always maintained. New edits also reset the last location "anchor" back to the most recent edit, so that pressing Ctrl+Alt+LEFT_ARROW once again brings you to the most recent edit rather than a historical one.

Printing editor content now includes the current date in addition to the filename in the header of each printed page.

The GTK light theme has been updated to align better with the default GTK3 Adwaita theme.

Old:

New:

SWT now natively styles the menu under Windows in the dark theme.

Old:

New:

SWT now natively styles drop-down boxes under Windows in the dark theme.

Old:

New:

The active tab selection highlighter has been enabled for Eclipse’s default dark themes. This will help users identify which tab is active at a glance.

SWT now natively supports selection highlighter in tables under Windows in the dark theme.

The interpretation of ASCII control characters in the Console View was extended to recognize the characters: \0 - null byte. If interpretation is enabled, any null byte will be stripped and not shown in console view. This is most relevant for the Linux platform where a null byte in console view causes anything after it on the same line to be not rendered.

This feature is disabled by default. You can enable it on the Run/Debug > Console preference page.

Binaries for Linux AArch64 (Arm64) are available for testing. With the raising popularity of this architecture people can continue using the Eclipse IDE even when changing their machine.

Java 15 is out and Eclipse JDT supports Java 15 for 4.17 via Marketplace.

The release notably includes the following Java 15 features:

Please note that preview option should be on for preview language features. For an informal introduction of the support, please refer to Java 15 Examples wiki.

JUnit view now provides a context-menu option to collapse all nodes:

JUnit view now provides the ability to sort results by execution time. By default, results will be sorted by execution order. Choosing Sort By > Execution Time from the JUnit View menu will reorder the results once all tests are complete. While tests are still running, they will be shown in execution order.

Sorting by execution order results in:

Content Assist now fully supports both substring and subword matches for types:

Substring matches are always shown and subword matches can be enabled/disabled with the existing Show subword matches option on the Java > Editor > Content Assist preference page.

A new tab has been added that gathers cleanups that improve the time performance: the existing lazy operator cleanup and the regex precompiler cleanup.

A new clean up has been added that makes use of Objects.equals() to implement the equals(Object) method.

It reduces the code and improves the reading. The cleanup is only available for Java 7 or higher. Although this kind of comparison is almost exclusively seen in the equals(Object) method, it can also reduce code in other methods.

To select the clean up, invoke Source > Clean Up…​, use a custom profile, and on the Configure…​ dialog select Use Objects.equals() in the equals method implementation on the Unnecessary Code tab.

For the given code:

You get this after the clean up:

A new clean up has been added that optimizes the regular expression execution by precompiling it.

It replaces some usages of java.lang.String by usages of java.util.regex.Pattern. The cleanup is done only if it is sure that the string is used as a regular expression. If there is any doubt, nothing is done. The regular expression must be explicitly used several times to be sure the cleanup is useful.

To select the clean up, invoke Source > Clean Up…​, use a custom profile, and on the Configure…​ dialog select Precompiles reused regular expressions on the Optimization tab.

For the given code:

You get this after the clean up:

A new quickfix has been added to replace string concatenation with String.format, similar to the existing ones for StringBuilder and MessageFormat.

A new quickfix has been added to create missing methods for method references.

The code minings within an editor can be enabled/disabled through the Find Actions menu (Ctrl+3).

A new setting in the Formatter profile controls line wrapping of assert statements. A line wrap can be added between the assert condition and its error message. The setting can be found in the Profile Editor (Preferences > Java > Code Style > Formatter > Edit…​) in the Line Wrapping > Wrapping Settings > Statemtens > 'assert' messages node.

The JDT debugger is now capable of inspecting/evaluating expressions with anonymous class instances.

The JDT debugger has now a checkbox option to activate the command line support for JEP 358. This is disabled below Java 14 and enabled by default for Java programs launched with Java 14 and above.

-XX:+ShowCodeDetailsInExceptionMessages

JVM is now capable of analyzing which variable was null at the point of NullPointerException and describe the variable with a null-detail message in the NPE.

The option Show Type Names in the Variables and Expressions views now displays the value’s actual type instead of its declared type. This simplifies debugging especially when variable details (toString()) is shown As the label for all variables.

To enable Show Type Names in the Variables view, column mode must be disabled (View Menu > Layout > Show Columns).

Example: