Since the 18th of this month we have already available the new version of eclipse ‘Eclipse 4.15’. Why updating it? It is always a nuisance to be updating but it is totally recommended, especially for the improvement in the overall performance of the program (especially at the startup). Also you do not have to worry about losing your projects and the general configuration of your Workbench, although you do have to take into account that you will have to reinstall the ADT (ABAP Development Tools) and the rest of the extensions that you had.
Regarding the improvements, it is true that many times from one version to another there are not many differences, but this time the improvements are considerable. These are the main features that the new version offers and that may interest you, especially if you are an abaper:
- General performance updates: Interactive performance has been further improved in this release, Eclipse is now more agile and faster than before, especially in start-up. To improve this, redraw is disabled by default during the collapse and expansion operation of tree viewers.
- Code minings for problem annotations: This is a feature of the previous version, but it did not work for ABAP until now.
- Problems will appear above the problematic statement: This means that you can hide the Problem view most of the time and have more vertical space for your code.
We also have other platform updates such as:
- Console enhancement: Console view now shows the completion time of a process. ASCII control characters have also been extended to support the following characters: \ f – form advance and \ v – vertical tab.
- Default hierarchical project layout: In Project Explorer the default layout for displaying projects changes from plane to hierarchical. This can be changed in the view menu.
Not bad at all, right? I leave you here the link for download. And a small installation guide in case you need it.
INSTALLATION
The first thing will be to access the link that we have provided and click on the download button, on this and on the next page (in case we weren’t sure the first time).
Once the file is downloaded, we run the installer as administrator. Before carrying out this step, it is advisable to delete any previous version of the program that we may have on our computer. Don’t worry about your projects and specific configuration. Your workspace will be kept in the new version!
In this way we would already have the new version of Eclipse installed, but it is necessary to reinstall the ABAP Development Tools (and the rest of the extensions that you had).
To install them we just have to go to the ‘Help’ → ‘Install new software’ tab.
Enter the following URL https://tools.hana.ondemand.com/2019-12 (this link may be different as Eclipse versions are modified, but it is valid for the current version). And select the ABAP Development Tools. Follow the steps below to finish the installation.
Once this step is finished, we will already have the new version working on our computer and we will be able to enjoy all its advantages.