Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Pinning Eclipse to Windows Taskbar

Typically, one may pin an application to the Windows taskbar (i.e. Windows 7 or Windows 8 Taskbar), by right-click the application's icon on the taskbar and choosing "Pin this program to taskbar". However, this method appears not to work for recent version of Eclipse.  This threat at superuser.com provides a few solution to it. The method I follow and that works for me is.,

  1. Locate the Eclipse executable, i.e., eclipse.exe
  2. Right-click on eclipse.exe and choose "Create shortcut" to create a shortcut for eclipse.exe.
  3. The shortcut will be named as "eclipse - Shortcut". Rename it as "eclipse"
  4. Right-click on the shortcut and choose "Properties"
  5. Add a command line argument to "Target" for the shortcut resembling
    
    -vm "C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_55\jre\bin\server\jvm.dll"
    

    Note that you must change "jdk1.7.0_55" to match version of your JDK.

  6. In Windows 8.1, search "system environment variables" and choose "Edit system environment variables". Add your JDK's bin path to the PATH environment variable, e.g.,
    
    C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_55\bin
    

    Note in the above, change "jdk1.7.0_55" to match version of your JDK.

  7. Launch Eclipse by double-clicking on the shortcut
  8. Once Eclipse pass the choosing Workspace stage and fully loaded, right-click the eclipse icon on the taskbar, choose "Pin this program to taskbar"
Although the thread at superuser.com provides a few solutions to pin Eclipse to the taskbar, many point out that once Eclipse fully loaded, two Eclipse icons will appear on the taskbar. The solution allows me to pin Eclipse on the taskbar and leads to only a single Eclipse icon on the taskbar once Eclipse is fully loaded.

The above solution is hinted in a post of the threat. The post also points to a relevant Eclipse bug report and the report also helps me to come out the solution.

By the way, pinning a program results a shortcut is created in the directory of

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar
 
 


3 comments:

  1. Many Thanks! :) I included such argument directly into eclipse.ini and it worked perfectly for me!

    Best Regards,
    Alex

    ReplyDelete
  2. This solution doesn't seem to work for me. Any other suggestions? I even installed a new jre incase the jdk was getting in the way. The jre is in the environments as priority.

    ReplyDelete